Philips 7FF2FPA/05 7″ Digital Photoframe Reviews
View, share, organise and relive your memories with the 7FF2FPA photo frame from Philips! The 7FF2FPA is the easiest way to display your digital photos in stunning quality. It has a beautiful 7? screen, seven handy buttons and loads of fantastic features, including random play and special effects. It also has a 16 MB internal memory so you can manage photos, and a modern design to really make them shine! ( other LCD Digital Photo Frame )
“Excellent, if a little small” 
I wanted a digital photoframe for my parents, but never having owned one was unsure what to look for.
Eventually I decided, mainly based on Amazon reviews, that I wanted one with a good resolution, random play option and a good range of times between transitions.
Some frames have low (c400 x 200) resolutions, others have no random feature and some with a random feature have a very short maximum transition time (only a few minutes).
This little Philips frame fits the bill. It has a viewable area of 720 x 480 resolution, with random play and transition times from 5 seconds to 12 hours.
There are two card slots for a variety of memory cards and you can also connect via a USB cable to a PC or pen drive.
There’s 16MB of internal memory, but that’s too small to be of much use.
You can set the time and date and also set the unit to switch itself on and off. Useful for ensuring that the unit displays pictures during the day without having to switch it on and off.
There’s no internal battery so if you unplug the system you lose the time and date, and also the auto on and off settings. The transition type (sequential or random), transition interval and type (fade, etc) seem to be stored on the memory cards and are not lost on power off.
The unit can be set up for landscape and portrait, but it does crop (rather than stretch or compress) images that do not fit the format. Thus portrait close-ups are cropped top and bottom when displayed on the frame set as landscape.
There’s the usual functions to view pictures as thumbnails and to rotate and delete (all or selected) pictures. The thumbnail view shows the date the picture was taken and the native resolution but you cannot view the filename of the picture.
Finally you can adjust brightness and other options such as sound (beep) and background colour (black, white, grey) for when a picture does not quite fill the screen.
So, overall an excellent little device with only a few drawbacks. The screen is a little small with a 6.5″ diagonal (and 3:2 aspect ratio) - I wish I’d bought a bigger one. The lack of battery back up is annoying, as is the fact that the manual was written by someone whose first language wasn’t human. The manual is also quite partial, not covering all the unit’s features. However if you play around with the menus you’ll soon get the hang of it.
I could not get all the information I needed (especially random transition times) from the web so I e-mailed Philips. Their customer service is excellent (not a phrase you often hear) and they answered my query fully and within 24 hours. If you need more information, drop them a line.
EDIT
I originally used this with a Fuji 1GB SD card, factory formated as FAT. Everything was fine until I tried to copy more than 250 files, at which an error occurred. Per the web this is a common fault with FAT. I reformatted with NTFS and everything was fine - can put 1000’s of images on the card. But the frame will not read NTFS formatted cards.
The only thing that will work for more than 250 images is FAT32. For some reason this is very very slow for file transfer on my (new) Vista laptop. In addition if I remove the card from the laptop and re-insert it, the laptop will not recognise it - need to reboot to see it again.
So a real pain to get more than 250 images onto the card, but happily this is not something I need to do very often.
Philips’ customer services were as good as ever and they confirm that the frame will only read FAT32 formatted cards, and only up to 2GB.
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