Reviewed by Harry Eaton

There’s a lot to like about the D-Link DSM-210. Whether it’s the large 10” display, wireless and Ethernet connections, or the eco-friendly auto shutoff feature.

The frame comes with a black faceplate. A white faceplate is also included in the box. In each bottom corner is a small circular cutout. One is for the IR remote and the other is a window for the motion sensor. Instead of implementing a timer feature to allow you to automatically turn the frame on and off depending on the time of day, the motion sensor will shut off the display after 15 minutes that no motion is detected in the room, and will turn it back on when movement resumes.

There are touch sensative buttons that glow for a few seconds once you touch the frame. These controls are the only ones available directly through the frame itself. All other interaction is done with the IR remote.

On the back of the frame is mounting holes to hang the frame on a wall or the stand for either portrait or landscape mode. As well as the (Wi-Fi Protected Setup) button, memory card and USB slots and an the ethernet port.

On the top edge is the power switch and a WPS switch. This is a new method of ‘pairing’ a WiFi device with a wireless router or access point. It’s sort of like pairing devices with Bluetooth as a PIN is required. the DSM-210 can also connect to your wireless router the same way you usually connect devices. By the SSID name. Although this frame is WiFi enabled, it also has an Ethernet jack if you prefer to connect it to your router with a cable. Wireless setup couldn’t be much easier. Navigate to the wireless connection option in the setup menu and the frame quickly displays the available networks.

The 10 inch display is one of the nicest ones I’ve seen. The D-Link has very nice color and crispness. It’s bright and can be viewed easily at many different angles. The screen resolution is 800×480, which is a widescreen 16:9 format. The images that your digital camera captures are probably not going to be in widescreen format. So by default, your pictures will display in 4:3 format and you’ll see black bars on either side of the image. If this annoys you, you can have the image stretch to fit the screen or cropped to fit. Both of those options make the resulting image a little fuzzy. In addition to the built in 1GB of internal memory, there is also a USB port and a flash card slot that can accommodate SD, MMC and Memory Sticks.

When you first turn on the frame, you’ll be presented with the main menu. If you have any USB flash drives or memory cards plugged in, you’ll see them in the Frame Memory listing. From there, you can pick which memory device you’d like to view images from.

While you’re viewing an image, you can press the Menu button on the IR remote. When you do this, you will have the ability to save that image to the internal memory. The frame just freezes while the operation is happening. It’s also important to note that there isn’t a way to copy multiple images into internal memory from USB or a memory card. Dlink has a Yahoo widget that you can install on your desktop. Essentially you install the widget and you can view the images stored on the frame’s internal memory in slideshow fashion on your PC. As long as your frame is on, you can run another slideshow on any PC connected to the same network. This widget is also the only way to transfer more than one picture at a time to your frame from a PC.

As far as transition effects go, I like the Pan and Zoom one the best. The time is approximately 5 seconds, between photos

You can also view images from various popular image sharing sites like flickr, Facebook, and Picasa. By creating an account on D-Link’s FrameCentral website,a free service, you can add all sorts of ‘channels’ to your frame. Many are professionally done and can be saved to the frame. There are many different channels including news, calendars, weather, business, animals, nature, cartoons and many others. You can then show just the content from an individual channel, or randomly show content from all channels. These channels are a nice feature as they allow you to view extra unknown content instead of your same images over and over. The only problem is that you can’t really interact with the info channels.

Another great way to view photos on the DSM-210 is via a UPnP-AV servers, such as a PC running Windows Media Player 11 or a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device on your network. D-Link includes a good deal of documentation in their manual (on the included CD) as to how to set this up. We paired the frame with a Vista Home Premium PC and found that to be a great way to view images.

People can also email images to your frame as it has its own email address. Great for friends and family to send you snapshots that will automatically show up in the slideshow if you’re viewing all channels.

D-Link’s remote is an 8-button unit that’s easy to use. The only problem is because there are no menu buttons on the frame, if you lose the remote, functionality of the digital frame is severely limited, also this digital frame is it only supports still images; there is no video support or speakers for playing MP3 or other audio files.

OverAll this is probably one of the best photo frames available and should be a top choice for anyone in the picture frame market.

* Memory card and USB flash drive not included. D-Link is not responsible for damage to the device and/or memory card/flash drive, or loss and/or damage to files on the memory card/flash drive, due to improper installation or usage.
** 1-Year Limited Warranty available only in the USA and Canada.
*** Computer must adhere to Microsoft’s recommended System Requirements. Please contact Microsoft for details.
**** Latest Software and Documentation are available at D-Link Tech Support site.

Product specifications, size and shape are subject to change without notice, and actual product appearance may differ from that depicted herein.

Dlink Customer Service : Telephone 1.800.326.1688