Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I've had one of these for a day, and it seems to do what the manufacturer says. When properly formatted (see below), the pictures are bright and accurate -- just what you'd imagine a digital picture frame would look like. Here are the two main lessons I've learned so far: 1. Formatting: Resize your pictures to fit within the frame's resolution of 480 pixels by 234 pixels. It will display bigger pictures (say, 2000x3000 pixels from a six-megapixel camera) but its algorithm for downsampling must be really stupid, as the results are awful -- the pictures look twinkly, oversharpened, overprocessed, and just plain ugly. Downsize them yourself, and all that goes away. If you have a lot of pix, this process can be somewhat tedious, but there is a very good freeware image manager called XnView that will do it on batches of pictures at once with a minimum of muss and fuss. 2. It won't display grayscale pictures (i.e., black-and-whites where the color count is reported as 256). To make these display, you have to convert them to RGB mode. They're still B&W in appearance, but internally they're full RGB, 16 million colors, and that makes little Coby very happy. Go figure. When you downsize to 480x234, you get a very small file -- less than 30KB, oftentimes. That means you can store hundreds of pictures on even a small memory card of 256MB. Put it in the slot, set Coby to either go through them in order, or shuffle them, and sit back and watch your life pass before your eyes in dazzling color (or dazzling black and white, if you must). My Coby was a little over $100, including shipping to Alaska. The image screen is only 7" diagonally, meaning you can't really display it on a wall, but it does make an excellent display for your desk. If they can get a wall-size version (say, 11x14) down under $500, I'll probably give that a try next. In case it's not clear from the product writeup on Amazon, you have to plug this thing into a power socket to use it. There's no battery. And, even if there was, it wouldn't be too feasible -- you'd have to either take the thing apart every few hours to stick in new batteries, or keep it plugged into a charger part of the time. Mo' bettah just to give up and accept that it's an AC device, not a battery device. Stan Jones Anchorage, Alaska