We’re over memory-card-only digital picture frames. The Impact8 suck down photos over Wi-Fi. An Internet connection grabs your latest images automatically from RSS feeds or a picture-publishing service. Even friends and relatives can upload pictures from anywhere.

However, this big-picture idea is problematic.

The Impact8 builds us up with its simple, effective features, but washed-out image quality brings us down. However, the online interface makes it easy to administer, overcoming the mediocre display.

We logged in to the free www.seeframe.com site from a Mac to register the frame and begin tossing it images over Wi-Fi. The portal includes a few ways to pass over pictures, such as a direct email, web-based upload, or importing an RSS feed. We stuck mostly to the RSS configuration, entering some MobileMe gallery URLs. After a few minutes, those images drifted over to the frame. Neat.

The 4:3 aspect-ratio screen perfectly matches most point-and-shoot digital cameras without having to crop any edges. But those images often looked washed-out and pale. However, the frame showed good sharpness and detail, and we could manually compensate for poor contrast by first editing photos on our Mac.