Cheap Digital Foci Photo Book 8-Inch Portable Digital Photo Album (PBK-080)

I have had this product for 2 months now and am very pleased with the quality. The simulated leather case with magnetic latch is well made. There is attention to detail in the product hardware, software and user manual. Note that there is an online user manual that is a bit more detailed than the manual that ships with the product.

I have more than 1000 images on my device. It is trivial to populate the device with images by simply dragging and dropping folders from the computer to the device.

The 800 x 600 pixel screen is bright, vivid and sharp. Although it is not necessary, I resized all my images to this resolution before loading them to the device's memory to achieve maximum performance. I don't know whether other file sizes negatively impact the screen's display quality.

The order images are displayed is based on their file names. You can control this order by prefixing the file names with 00, 01, 02, etc. before loading them on the device.

When you turn on the device, a matrix of album icons is displayed. Each icon is represented by the first image in the album (i.e. folder). I didn't feel this adequately identified an album. I got around this problem by creating a special first image consisting of a short textual phrase that described the folder's content.

You can navigate to an album in the matrix easily enough but if you have a lot of albums then you have a lot of matrices to navigate. To go from one matrix to the next you have to navigate to the last album in the matrix before the next matrix is displayed. I wish they provided a way to navigate between matrices without having to go through the inconvenient intermediate steps.

When you open an album, a matrix of images is displayed. It's easy to navigate to images in the matrix but again you have to navigate to the last image in the matrix before you can proceed to the images in the next matrix. I wish they had matrix scrolling here.

The flip-page slideshow with its page turning effect is nifty. You can pause, go back or forward, resume and change the transition time interval on the fly. In this mode, full-sized images are not displayed since part of the screen is taken up by a frame surrounding the image.

The full-screen slideshow has the same features as the flip-page except frames are no longer displayed for each image so that full size images can now be displayed. However the file name is superimposed on the image which I don't care for. I wish there was a way to turn this off. This type of slide show has special effect transitions between images. These special effect transitions cause a problem. If you choose a transition time interval of 4 seconds then normally you would see an image for 4 seconds before the next image is displayed. But if a special effect transition occurs then it eats up part of the 4 seconds so that you see that image for less than 4 seconds before the next transition begins. Special effect transitions occur randomly during the slide show so that some images don't have them. As a result some images are displayed for 4 seconds and some are displayed for less than that. I don't think it should work this way and I wish there was a way to turn off special effect transitions.

The device won't let you rename albums (folders) and images (file names). This would be handy sometimes.

I haven't tried the video and music features since that's not what I bought it for.

Despite the nits I mentioned above I recommend this device.Get more detail about Digital Foci Photo Book 8-Inch Portable Digital Photo Album (PBK-080).