Customer Reviews

Alpha Digital SA7A 7-Inch Clear Digital Photo Frame

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I purchased one of these before Christmas to test out. It seemed like a great deal: a digital photo viewer that doubles as a mp3 player and movie player. The feature list is a dream team of capabilities, but being a tech guy and having experienced many disappointments before, I remained skeptical, preparing for the worst. I knew that if I didn't like it, I could always return it. If it ended up working as advertised (even with a few glitches), I could give it to my dad so he can view photos without the PC.

When this product arrived, this turned out a lot more inferior than I previously imagined. The resolution is astonishingly low and the screen is very low quality. Everything about this product just screams low quality, from the construction to its interface to the actual operations of the unit. It takes about 5 seconds for the unit to turn on after pushing the power button either on the unit itself or on the remote.

Reading from SD card also takes a long time, taking about 5 seconds to read a 5 megapixel picture (1.5 MB). The low quality display makes everything dark and blurry.

The mp3 feature works as advertised, but the file name is cut off after 8 letters (think DOS) and there is no display of any kind as to the length, artist, etc, that is kept in the mp3 file's ID3 tags. I couldn't test the video playback features except for mpeg-1. I had some mp4's, but the unit says "unsupported format" even though they played on my PC.

The remote control is a joke. You need to be pointing DIRECTLY at the IR sensor. A few degrees off and it refuses to recognize. I thought the remote was broken when I tried this for the first time.

The video out is 1 nice feature, but sadly, you'll never use it. It outputs at the resolution of the unit. My HDTV upscaled the input and made it actually look nicer than on the unit!

To sum it up, this thing is a total piece of junk. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Sure, it's ambitious in its plans, but it fails to deliver on every level. DO NOT BUY this thing. You've been warned.

Simple method to fix the "strech" problem with the pictures:

1. Crop the original image to an aspect ratio that is the same as 480x242, or a width around 1.98 times the height.

2. Reduce the image to a size or 480x242 pixels.

3. Change the height of the image WITHOUT CHANGING THE WIDTH to 310 pixels. This is where the distortion takes place.

4. Load the image(s) to the frame and have fun.