Kodak EasyShare SV811 review

Kodak submitted a total of three frames this month, and this sits in the middle of the range in terms of price. But there's much more value here than in the 7in frame.

Visually, and physically, there's little difference between the two. The SV811 is finished in fairly dull plain, black plastic and the buttons on the back (including the volume switch) feel flimsy.

On closer inspection, however, there are plenty of areas where this frame surpasses its slightly smaller sister. One is that the frame has both a mini-USB port and a standard USB socket. This extra flexibility allows you to add not only USB thumbdrives, but also external hard disks.

There's a remote control, too, which also adds functionality that's missing from this frame's lesser-specified rivals. It doesn't come with the 128MB of internal memory enjoyed by the EX811, though, so you'll need to leave some form of portable memory, such as a USB flash drive, plugged in all the time.

But this is a small complaint when you consider how good the SV811's image quality is. The screen is sharp and bright, and in our tests exhibited better picture quality than most other frames in this Labs.

Edges and details are especially well defined and this is largely thanks to the 800 x 480 resolution - a huge jump in the number of pixels available on the 7in models on test.

If you can live without wireless and you're not bothered by the boring looks, you'll be hard pressed to find image quality much better than this for the money.

Author: Mike Jennings