Kodak Pulse

I’ve tested many digital photo frames, and found the results pretty hit-and-miss. Some digital frames offer great feature sets, but look far too much like a fancy piece of technology: your attention should be drawn to the picture, not the frame. Others look great, but can be tremendously difficult to get pictures to display right. Kodak’s Pulse sits happily in the middle, wrapping a small but well-implemented feature set in a sleek, minimalist design.

Image quality is fantastic. Though the 7-inch screen is only 800 x 600 pixels, you can’t make out individual dots from any reasonable viewing distance. The LED backlighting is flicker-free, providing an image that appears very close to a printed photograph.

The real draw card of the Pulse, however, is its ability to receive photographs via email. For this you’ll need to register on Kodak’s website, where you can choose an email address @kodakpulse.com. You’ll also need to connect the frame to your home or office Wi-Fi network, via its touchscreen interface.

Images are automatically re-scaled to save space on the frame, as you don’t need a 24-megapixel image to fill a 0.5-megapixel display. Unfortunately images aren’t auto-rotated, so portrait pictures display sideways. Once they’re on the frame, there’s still no way to rotate them. Simple solution: only send images in landscape to the frame.

Surprisingly, there’s no way to control who can send you images: your only protection against image-spam is the address you choose. You probably don’t want pcworld – something more obscure like pcw1048576 would be a far safer option. Still, once that address is out there, you can’t take it back.

Certainly, it makes it easy to send photos to your frame: it also makes it easy for someone to send pictures of things that should only happen in Vegas to your child’s bedroom, either maliciously or accidentally. Hey kids, that’s not your birthday party!