This 10.4-inch digital frame ($185 as of 5/7/2009) does its best to blend in with your retro ones. It even comes with an extra wooden frame, so you can switch between black and espresso, depending on your décor. It has 512MB of built-in memory and supports CompactFlash, MicroDrive, MemoryStick, MMC, SD, and xD cards, as well as USB flash drives. You also get a built-in alarm clock and headphone jack.

Pandigital's 1024-by-768-pixel resolution and its display with a 4:3 aspect ratio impressed me. It presented good detail and very little color shift (toward the cool side, as with most digital frames). If you don't like the look of things, the frame offers brightness, contrast, tint, and color controls, adjustments that are rather uncommon. You also get a built-in alarm clock and headphone jack. The "PanTouch" feature comes into play along the mat beside your pictures; the PanTouch controls embedded here let you turn album pages, move images along, and access menu settings. For slide shows, you can change speed and transition type, and shuffle modes. The frame plays AVI videos, too. You upload MP3s to the frame and play them along with the show. The sound from the Pandigital's speakers was average (a little tinny, but bearable) for the current digital picture-frame market.

The PAN1002W02T is advertised as Bluetooth- and Wi-Fi-compatible, but you'll need to buy a special dongle from the company to stream content from photo-sharing sites or RSS feeds. And, as with other frames we've seen, the Pandigital has no "power" button on its remote--you must use the switch on the frame itself.

--Kathleen Cullen