Vu SK-DP1046 Digital Photo Frame

It’s been a while since a DPF came across my lab table. The Vu DP1046 represents another of the company’s attempts at a visual product other than a television, although the deviation isn’t too far down the line.

Form Factor
At a glance the 1046 is actually a very neat looking DPF. It sports a black glossy frame that can easily be construed to be a finger magnet, not that you’d ever need to actually use your fingers for any function though, thanks to the full function remote. The 10.4-inch 4:3 ratio TFT LCD has a resolution of 800 x 600 pixels and a contrast ratio of 300:1. A set of controls can be found at the rear of the device above the stereo speakers.

Like almost all other DPFs, behind the display, on one side is a standard USB port for pen drives, a mini USB (2.0) connector port PC connectivity to access either cards or the 256MB of internal space, a 3.5mm earphone socket followed by an AV out option, power switch and the DC adapter port. The card slots are on the other side. It has support for - SD, MS, MMC, CF and XD cards.

Although I have to say that it’s a neat looking frame the build quality is shoddy and rather slipshod. When we first opened the box, a screw fell out and the device started falling apart. I‘m sincerely hoping that ones you buy from a proper store would be in a better condition.

Features and Performance
Interface
With such a large display, I expected a slightly higher pixel resolution but it was nevertheless quite clear. The UI is easy to navigate with very clear indicators for all the functions and options. The remote was quite erratic though even with a new battery and on the whole the UI was quite slow. When accessing memory cards or USBs, it was even slower depending on the capacity of the external source and how much data was present on it. For some reason the test piece I received refused to connect to the PC as a USB device unless there was a card present in the drive. Even then I was unable to copy paste anything onto the on board memory as an error kept popping up.

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