Digital Home Thoughts: Westinghouse 14" Digital Photo Frame

Looks Great, Works...OK
Before we jump into the good and bad, here are the basics. The DPR-1411 is a 14.1" digital picture frame. It supports JPEG, AVI Motion-JPEG, MPEG 1, MPEG 4 formats. It has 128 MB of internal memory and also supports all the regular memory card formats.


Figure 1: What you get in the box.

Let’s start off with the physical frame itself. This is a good sized frame with overall measurements of 16.2" x 11.5 " x 1.5". The frame has a classy black finish and comes with a white matte insert. As a nice touch, there are thumbscrews on the back that let you easily take it apart and substitute out any matte you like. The frame has a detachable kickstand depending if you want to use this frame on a table or on the wall.

The screen is the key to any digital picture frame and unfortunately, here is where this model starts to lose some points. The screen has a resolution of 1280 x 800 and from straight on, pictures look great, even at close range. The screen is 14.1" diagonally, however, unfortunately it is oddly proportioned relative to photos, so as a result your pictures are either cropped improperly or they have space around the edges. I’m guessing that they use repurposed screens like those that would be manufactured for a widescreen laptop. Unfortunately, the screen does not look nearly as good from angles as it does straight on. Also, like all digital picture frames, this one is backlit. I’d really like to see a clock/timer incorporated into the frame. That way I don’t need to manually turn it on and off just to avoid having it illuminate my living room at night.