Since digital photography has become so popular lately, the number of companies who keep rolling out specific products designed especially to work with this digital environment has also reached an unprecedented level. The booths here at CeBIT include a very large number of devices of this type, including several truly impressive ones, like the one presented by Genius.

Dubbed the DPF-AO2 Crystal, the device sports a very trendy and attractive external casing, which is most likely the first thing that will draw any user's attention to it (the same actually happened to us, when we've walked past Genius' booth). The DPF-AO2 Crystal is a 10.4-inch, 4:3-panel ratio Digital Photo Frame enclosed in a trendy acrylic frame design. The device can display users' photos in a rich variety of colors, thanks to the 10.4-inch high density display.

Unlike the majority of photo frames, the DPF-AO2 Crystal allows the user to enjoy the slide show feature that would play a suite of up to four pictures at different speeds. The device can be set up via its intuitive controls set, and a schedule on/off function allows the user to wake up the player or send it back to sleep mode. The Crystal is more than a photo frame, as it features a real-time clock and calendar function.

If JPEG or BMP pictures are not satisfactory enough, then you can fit the photo frame with digital music in the MP3 format or AVI (Motion-JPEG) videos. You can send the data to the photo frame via USB. The DPF-AO2 Crystal comes with 128 MB of internal flash storage, that can host up to 700 pictures using Auto Photo Resizing technology. The device can work with the most common types of memory cards, including CF, SD, MMC, MS, MS-Pro, and MD.

No word on the pricing yet, but since Genius is still struggling to gain more ground on the mid-range markets, it won't be extremely expensive, compared to other products of the same type available on the market.

Live report by Bogdan Popa and Alex Vochin from CeBIT 2008 Hanover, Germany.