Last week I wrote about the mini-disasters that struck while I was testing four products. Here’s an update:

Dymo DiscPainter: Luckily, the only problem I had was a bad ink cartridge, which wasn’t printing the color blue. With a new cartridge in, I was able to produce a very nice-looking design. The $280 printer lets you produce professional-looking CDs and DVDs with a technology called RadialPrint, which lays the ink down on the disc as it spins. It’s fun to watch and produces a high-quality disc cover, which beats labeling your CDs or DVDs with a magic marker. Because of the ink-cartridge problem, its final grade is 4 stars (out of five)

Click to see: Photo of dymo disc painter

Digital Spectrum Photo Frame: The problem I faced with this was the frame not connecting to my WPA2-enabled wireless network, even though the vendor said it supported the network. After discussing the issue, the vendor said a firmware update for the frame (not the router, which made me happy) would fix the issue. It did, and I was able to connect the photo frame to my wireless network.

With the frame connecting to the network, I could now try the FrameChannel service. The free Web-based service lets you create a personalized content stream of your photos, friends’ photos and other content feeds, including weather, news and entertainment channels. After creating an account, you can choose rules for each channel, and the service will create a personalized RSS feed that streams down to your photo frame. If you don’t own a supported frame, you can still use the service and create a personalized RSS feed that can be viewed through a feed reader, or utilize a Yahoo or Google desktop widget to view the streams. Photos can be sent to the service through the Web, e-mail or even camera phones (you get a custom e-mail address). You can even subscribe to other photo feeds (such as Flickr and Picasa) if you already have those stored somewhere. Final grades: Frame, 4 stars; FrameChannel, 4.5 stars.

ComOne Phoenix Internet Radio: Like the photo frame, this device wouldn’t connect to my WPA2-protected home network. Unlike the photo frame, a firmware update didn’t solve the problem. I disabled the secure network and was able to connect the device to the Internet, and a software update was downloaded, but WPA2 support is not part of the update. I tested the device on the unprotected network, but without WPA2 support I can’t recommend the device fully.