Portable Portraits

When I think back on what sealed my friendship with my high school classmate Antje, the obvious answer is chocolate. I'll never forget her 18th birthday party, when we devoured double servings of her mother's amazing chocolate mousse, or the times I'd drop by her house to nibble on the German chocolate bars her dad brought home by the dozen from business trips to Europe.

But now that we're grownups, Antje and I don't get to share those rich chocolate moments anymore. She's a busy working mom, living with her husband and two-year-old boy a few minutes from the beautiful California coastline, while I'm still single and confused, living a few blocks from a Manhattan sewage-treatment plant. We call and we write, but we haven't seen each other in years.

So when I had to pick someone to help me test a new digital picture frame from Kodak--which goes on sale at Kodak.com this week--my high school pal was the obvious choice. After all, what new mom can resist snapping pictures of her precious offspring? And with a Ph.D. in biomedical sciences, she's hardly a technophobe.

"I won't have to spend hours every night testing it, will I?" she asked. "Oh, no," I lied, knowing full well that new technology always takes longer to use than you think it will.

First, you need a digital camera that uses CompactFlash memory cards. About the size of a Wheat Thin, a flash card is the "film" used in many digital cameras today. After taking a few pictures, you remove the card and insert it into a slot on the right-hand side of the polished wood frame. In a few seconds, your pictures are displayed in full color on the 4-in. by 5-in. screen. The frame holds up to 40 images and cycles through them slide-show style. A built-in modem lets you send shots over the Net to a friend's e-mail In box or to her frame, if she has one.

Other companies, including Ceiva Logic and Digi-Frame, sell digital frames, but Kodak's is the only one that lets you load pictures directly into the frame, send them over the Net and order prints--all without booting up your PC. The $300 base price, plus $5-to-$10-a-month usage fee, is no bargain, but it's competitive with other digital frames.

Neither of us had any problem getting our pictures to appear. Antje's son Harrison was so impressed that he would rush into her bedroom at 6 a.m. each day just to stare at his digital likeness onscreen, while I treated myself to mid-workday forays in Central Park to snap the golden fall leaves.

Exchanging pictures was a little trickier. While the controls were clear--you just press a MENU button on top of the frame to select which images to send--Antje noticed that you could transmit only about 10 images at a time, and even that tied up the phone line for as long as 20 minutes. I was disappointed that my digital pictures didn't fill the screen completely--a thin black bar appeared at the top and bottom--but Antje said she didn't mind.

So I got to see her new house, and she got a peek at my new window office. She sent me pictures of Harrison at the pumpkin patch, while I sent snaps of my main squeeze. We had such fun, it hardly felt like work. But since I'm the only one getting paid for this assignment, I think I owe her a big box of chocolates--which to us may be worth a thousand digital pictures.

E-mail Anita at hamilton@time.com