Digital Picture Frame and Printer: Two Products in One

In the tradition of the great TV commercial with the “breath mint versus candy mint” controversy, the Smartparts SP8PRT Digital Picture Frame and Printer ($300 street) is poised to start the argument over whether it’s a digital picture frame or a printer. I vote for calling it a small-format dedicated photo printer with a really big (8-inch) preview screen. But given that the screen is in the form of a picture frame, you can reasonably argue that it’s a picture frame that prints. Either way, it’s two—”yes, two!”—products in one. SLIDESHOW (9)

Slideshow | All Shots

Physically, the SP8PRT is a picture frame with a thermal-dye printer mounted on its back. The frame itself is both wider and taller than the printer, so the printer is largely hidden from view when you’re looking at images. If you look from the side, however, you’ll see the printer positioned to serve as a bulky stand for the frame.

The frame can show pictures (and the printer can print) from a USB key, a camera memory card, or from the internal 120MB flash memory. (The memory card slot and USB port, as well as the power switch, are on the back of the printer.) The frame can also show movies and play sound from all of the same sources. There’s no connection for a computer, either for printing or for moving photos to the frame’s memory, but you can move files to the internal memory from a USB key or memory card.Buzz up!
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Setup is simple. The printer uses a single print pack that includes both a dye roll and a continuous paper roll. You simply slide the pack into the printer and plug in the power cord. Turn on the power and you’re ready to view pictures or print them.

The SP8PRT is at least more successful, arguably, as a picture frame than as a printer. Images are bright, with good color quality, and the LCD delivers a wide angle of view—at 140 degrees horizontally, and, thanks to the tilted resting position, almost 90 degrees from above, although not from below (the actual vertical angle of view is 120 degrees).

A set of control buttons on the side of the printer lets you control which source the frame is reading from, whether it’s showing one picture or cycling through a slideshow, and so on. The controls are essentially duplicated on a credit-card-size remote, which is much easier to use than the controls on the printer itself, since you can see both the image on the screen and the buttons on the remote at the same time.

The user manual does a poor job of explaining how to use the controls, but the menus are designed well enough for me to figure out the frame’s functions with about 30 minutes of experimentation.

Unfortunately, the menus don’t offer much in the way of features for editing individual photos, something that’s pretty much standard on today’s dedicated photo printers For example, it’s sometimes useful to brighten or darken individual photos for better viewing in a slideshow. Though the frame offers brightness and contrast controls, once you set them, the setting applies to every image until you change it again.

Similarly, a rotation command lets you rotate a photo to the proper orientation, but the change isn’t saved. When you come back to the photo later, you have to rotate it again. Other common photo-editing features, like red-eye removal and cropping, aren’t available. Without these features built in, the only way to fix your photos is to edit them on your computer, then copy the files to a USB key and move them to the frame. This isn’t all that hard to do, but being able to edit your photos on the frame would be better.

Like most small-format thermal-dye printers, the printer is limited to 4-by-6-inch photos. You can either print the picture currently showing or select multiple photos and print them with a single command.

The SP8PRT’s print speed hovers around a more-than-acceptable 60 seconds per photo. I timed it at 54 seconds to 1:05, depending on the photo. As a point of comparison, the Canon Selphy ES2—a thermal-dye printer that costs somewhat less but lacks the digital frame capability—took between 1:12 and 1:20 per photo.

Unlike most photo printers, the SP8PRT doesn’t print on individual flat sheets of paper. Instead, it uses a tightly wound continuous roll, automatically cutting off the paper after printing each photo. The result is a noticeable curl in the photos, which may bother some people. The paper is also a little thinner than usual, which some people may find bothersome as well.

On the plus side, the photos are highly water- and scratch-resistant, as you would expect with thermal-dye output. Image quality is also a plus, easily matching anything you would expect from a local drugstore or photo shop. One important oversight is that Smartparts hasn’t rated (or tested) the output for lightfastness, so there’s simply no way to know how long the photos might last.

The running cost is another potential issue. Photos from most dedicated photo printers today cost 25 to 30 cents apiece. The cost with the SP8PRT is roughly twice that, at 55.5 cents each, based on $19.99 for a 36-photo print cartridge. That’s a dollar (or more) premium for every four photos, or $100 for every 400 photos you print over the lifetime of the printer.

It’s hard to recommend paying that much extra in running costs just for the convenience and gadget appeal of printing photos from a digital picture frame. But if you want that ability, and are willing to pay for it, the Smartparts SP8PRT Digital Photo Frame and Printer can certainly do the job.

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