Product Reviews

The ClearFrame Plus sounds like a digital photo frame, and looks like one, and indeed you can use it as one - but it's also a fully featured 15in TV/DVD combo which can play video DVDs and audio CDs, show terrestrial TV with its built-in tuner, or display your own video source via composite, S-Video, SCART and VGA connectors. The only omission is an HDMI digital video input, but then the screen is the wrong shape for HD video anyway.

The panel's native resolution of 1,024 x 768 pixels scales well to give a good, crisp picture when watching TV, DVD or another video source. It also makes the ClearFrame Plus a capable computer monitor, unlike many multi-purpose displays: when we connected a PC it presented a sharp, stable picture. Light colours appeared slightly washed out, but contrast was very solid and lighting seemed even. Colour saturation and sound quality were merely satisfactory, but we had no major complaints overall. We also noted that the viewing angle

ADVERTISEMENT

was pleasingly wide - important if several people want to watch together - and a final treat was the discovery that the DVD player would happily accept Region 1 DVDs, imported from the US, as well as UK Region 2 discs.

Sadly, these positive first impressions were spoilt by the ClearFrame's ugly and illogical user interface. For example, the volume up button on the remote is to the left of the volume down button. How confusing is that? And it took a lot of experimenting before we discovered that, once you've selected an input source, pressing Enter doesn't confirm your selection, but cancels it. Instead, you need to press the right arrow key. Onscreen menus take a variety of arbitrary forms and are peppered with slapdash errors such as 'mono/setero'.

Given its name, the ClearFrame also does a surprisingly poor job of displaying photos. It accepts a wide range of memory card formats, plus home-burned CD-Rs, but using the remote's up and down buttons to select pictures is a tedious process, and photos are displayed in an interlaced screen mode, causing horrid flickering. The only slideshow option is to cycle once through all the images on your card in alphabetical order, and there are no transition effects. You can also play MP3s and MPEG4 videos (such as DivX files), which works well, but it's a shame DVD-Rs aren't supported.

Overall, the ClearFrame Plus is a missed opportunity: the screen's great, but in practice it's more hassle than it's worth to use it as anything more than a TV/DVD combo, which fatally undermines the whole idea.