Customer Reviews

Aiptek Portable 3D Photo and Video Display (Black)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I recently purchase a Fujifilm W3 camera and wanted a large, portable viewing device for showing off my 3d photos. The display on the W3 is incredible, and I assumed this photo frame would be similar. Not so.

There are a few things that make the device unpleasant from the very start:
- First of all, the resolution is pretty low. You will notice right away that the images are quite pixelated.
- It only supports a specific format for 3d images. It is not difficult to use a freeware conversion tool to convert from the Fujifilm camera format to the side-by-side image format required, but it is inconvenient. This would not be a concern if you were moving images from another Aiptek device.

Neither of these issues were what turned me away from the device, however. For the relatively low cost I could have tolerated the low resolution, and although its a pain I could have gone through the process of converting all of my favorite images to work with this device. The real show stopper is that the 3d effect on this display is purely awful. This kind of display requires proper position to be effective, but on this particular device there is no so-called sweet spot. No matter how you position the display, you'll never get the entire image to look clear. The further away objects are in the picture, the blurrier they get. I'd be embarrassed to show anyone images off of this device, thus I returned it.

It may be that photos/videos taken with Aiptek devices look great, but those taken on the Fujifilm W3 certainly do not.

Hi,
I am in the 3D Autostereoscopic (3D without the glasses (3disnow.com)) business.
I have glasses free monitors from 7" to 42", and let me note, this is not new technology.
I have a Sharp RD3D that must be over 6 years old. Barrier technology goes back to Frederic Ives, (1902), "A novel stereogram". Journal of the Franklin Institute.

What makes this different is it's portability. I does not need a computer to run it.

Now here is my review;
The battery life could be better.

It runs well from the output brought over from the Aiptek Camera.

I have also generated output from the Fuji 3D W3 camera as well as computer generated side-by-side output.
The Fuji output needs to be converted to side by side using Stereo PhotoMaker or Stereo Movie Maker.
After conversion to avi or jpeg files, I also resize and rescale for use in the Aiptek frame.
There has been 1 glitch with the jpeg files as the Frame does not recognize all the files.
I have been in touch with Aiptek support on this issue and have sent them samples to review.

As far as the visual quality, it is not bad - Depending on the shot.
The price and portability are what make this very interesting.

2.5 Stars!

I purchased this to play videos recorded with my Fuji W3 camera. This display works but needs improvement. The screen on the W3 looks much better.

The Aiptek frame and camera use side by side 3D format which cuts the quality of the image in half. When displayed on this frame, Each eye gets 600x400? lines of resolution. That's low for a 8" screen. My HD video looks a bit blurry and dull but not horrible.

For best 3D effect the screen must be close to your face and centered. Looking from an off angle may produce a blurry or double image. Limited viewing distance and angles make this display a poor choice to use as a photo frame for public display. Placing the frame at eye level would be ideal.

I have my Fuji W3 Videos playing on the Frame, It seems to be prone to crashing and freezing while playing videos.

I converted the video with Fuji Software to Side by Side (for 3d TV) and Ran it through the mp4 encoder software (Media Converter 2.5) that came with the frame. High Quality 720P footage crashes the frame very frequenly. Low Quality 720P mp4 plays but randomly crashes. Longest I have had it running without crashing/freezing is about 12 hours. The Frame cant handle much 3D effect, too much effect and it shows double image.

I hope they can fix the crashing. I have not yet tried another SD card or called support.

AIPTEK, Please make it better!
1. Higher resolution Screen
2. Brighter/Clearer screen and barrier
3. Better Battery life.
4. MPO support
5. Fix the Crashing playing video.

Yes, it does exist, and it works very well. I am very pleased with this; it is simple to use and the 3-D effect on both stills and video I've shot with the Aiptek camera is great. If this is a hint of what is coming in the autostereoscopic department, then maybe there really is hope for glasses free 3-D TVs someday. Sure, you have to be directly in front of the screen for it to work, but it's not a big deal really. It's far more impressive than the smaller screen on the camera.

I've had my Aiptek frame for a couple of days now. This is one of those rare products that deserve both the 5 star and 1 star reviews it's getting.

I bought it because I have 25+ years of personal 3D photos (Realist, Nimslo and ViewMaster formats). I figured this might be a good way to get them out of the box and onto my mantle.

I initially tried to create the compatible stereo format from scans using Paint.Net. This proved to be too hard to align by eye. So I found Stereo Master and became a bit more successful. The biggest issue with older stereo formats is that they have portrait orientation - the Aiptek wants landscape orientation. This means my successful photo attempts looked great in 3d but were stretched a lot. I need to sort this out before I consider the Aiptek acceptable for my intended use.

There are a lot of comments in other Amazon reviews about how viewable the photo frame is in 3d mode. Many reviewers comment on how there are limited viewing positions that work for the frame. This is absolutely true. It doesn't work well at a distance. You have to be right in front of it and at a specific distance (which is something like 2 to 3 feet away). This means it's not a replacement for a photo frame that sits on a mantle. It is probably meant to sit on a desk or be passed around.

The picture quality is iffy. I'll be happy if I can make it work for me as it is. But it really needs a bit more resolution.

The firmware is very minimalistic. It has just enough features to be barely functional.

It's a terrible product when you compare it to a traditional photo frame (I'd give it one star if this was the comparison). It's reasonable if you consider it a novelty 3D product (I'd say it's a 4 star product in this category). Since I had hoped to use it as a mantle 3D photo frame - my rating is 2 stars. However, I'm very likely going to keep it.

First compared to the fuji v1 3d display the AIPTEK rating will be -10 stars, picture quality and feature.
This frame is ok only for viewing AIPETK 3D camera recording.
If you convert any 3D video format to side by side 720P it will freeze.
AIPTEK support didn't reply to my questions.
The price is good but the frame is not!
Need more details? ok
The contrast and resolution suck. There is no parallax adjustment.
No button to switch between 3D and 2D.
What else can you miss?..
Any way maybe with a new firmware this frame can have it's bugs fixed and more feature but not better image quality for sure.
Think twice before buying this frame.

Doesn't display in a 2D mode like it says it just trioes to make 2D into 3D but because the resolution is low and there are horizontal lines seperating pixels rows you can't see hardly anything.
Also it freezes on random JPG images. I tried contacting Aiptek support but they kept me on hold for 15 min then disconnected me.
Not worth $20 let alone $120.
DO NOT BUY!

Neat little viewer--great companion for the Aiptek 3D camera.

I would have given it five stars if it would leave my 2D videos alone and not try to play them as 3D...

When I got this product it was quite evident that the screen had alignment problems. The mask and the underlying LCD screen were aligned so that you got pseudoscopic stereo with L & R views reversed if you looked at the screen straight on. This happens with both my pictures and the demo pictures. In addition there was quite a lot of ghosting. But this could be due to the fact that I had to view off axis to get true stereo, and it might be better on axis. There is no internal control for fixing this, but a simple R/L reversal would be a good fix. I tried slides with R/L reversed, and they only were marginally better.

I already knew that this would not accept the Fuji format so I had prepared side by side images using stereo photo maker. After loading them onto a 4Gb card I found that inserting the card locked up the photo viewer. I then tried putting a few onto the internal memory, and they did the same thing. So after looking in the manual it seems that it only accepts 12Mpixel images and the Fuji converted images exceeded that. So I loaded a few that were under 12Mpixels and they displayed, but were stretched out 2x in the horizontal. Apparently this frame needs images that are compressed 50% in the horizontal. If you have images that are correct for this viewer, they will not be suitable for other displays. The locking up on large picture files is totally unacceptable. It should just give a message saying the file is too large to display. The squashed picture is not an acceptable format. The Fuji AVI format can be converted for this screen, but it needs at least two steps in the conversion.

The screen is nice and bright and when I could find a suitable angle to view the picture, it looked very good,but with some annoying ghosting in spots. The viewing distance should be between 2 and 3 ft. The manual gives it only in cm, so obviously they are not considering the American market. Images with very low contrast looked good in 3D, but high contrast images were severly ghosted. Videos were even worse.

It is a nice idea, but the format limitations, and the defective alignment make it not acceptable. Bewarned that if you buy this product you have to check the viewing angles carefully. I suspect that the differing reactions to this viewer are probably due to poor quality control in the screen construction, so you might get a good one, or maybe not.

Any item like this should be easy to use, so you should be able to punch the play button and then be able to scroll through your pictures. But the unit was extremely unresponsive. When in thumbnail mode it took forever to generate thumbnails, and you could not press play to immediately select a picture. Every time you went back to thumbnail mode it had to regenerate them. The only solution was to hit the reset. The programming needs to be complentely rewritten to make it responsive. There are other bugs which create bad images when the picture has a square aspect ratio. Aiptec justifies the right view to the left edge of the screen and the left view to the right edge for square pictures. As a result you have to cross your eyes considerably, and there is severe ghosting in the blank areas which is confusing. The thumbnails are unusable because they display the squashed double images which makes them unrecognizable. It is possible that some of these problems could be fixed externally by a program that will quickly and easily create the images to display complete with thumbnails. Perhaps the Aiptec camera produces such images, but most serious 3D users will want the superior Fuji camera, and there is no program supplied to transform the Fuji formats to the Aiptec format.

If the unit had good alignment with minimal ghosting I might put up with the other quirks, but as it is, it is being returned, because it is unwatchable, and the software is very slow and buggy.

It is possible that ghosting may be acceptable in some samples of this model. Also variations such as glasses may affect the results. But I have fairly severe astigmatism and need bifocul glasses. Perhaps some better designed autostereo screens will be manufactured for the 3D tablet computers which should have much better software. I also tried the Viewsonic 3D viewer which is identical except for the logo and the mono speaker. It had the same amount of ghosting and the same lockup problems, but the controls seemed more responsive. This viewer is a nice idea, but unless the ghosting can be substantially reduced it can not be recommended.

Worked great right out of the box!

I have test images from multiple sources including some of my own taken with three different 3D cameras. The first two cameras used the new Lunmix 3D Lens on the new Lumix GH2 and GF2 Bodies. The third camera wasthe ne w FinePix 3D W3. The other pictures were from various sources available on the Internet. I have not had time to do a detailed evaluation. In general quality of the images was high in terms of resolution and color. The 3D effect was visible and reasonably natural.

The user interface on the frame and through the remote control is well designed and functions easily as expected.