Customer Reviews

HP DreamScreen 130 13-Inch Wireless Connected Screen

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Lets first just get some things out of the way before I talk about the quality of what the device DOES do lets talk about what it does not, yet claims to do.


Downright Lies
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The following quotes are from the HP site itself:

"The HP DreamScreen is a gateway to the Internet using your wireless network to access
weather info, Snapfish and your favorite web destinations."

This is just untrue. There is no integrated web browser. It has three web `apps' on it: SnapFish, Pandora, Facebook. That's it. It does not read RSS feeds, or do much of anything you probably want it to do, simple things like display news or recipes.

"Stay current with social network sites like Facebook"

`Like' facebook? There is only Facebook: nothing else.

"Be organized with a built-in alarm clock & calendar."

This is laughable. Wondering how to sync the calendar with outlook or google or anything; maybe even just add appointments, I finally consulted their online documentation. Here, seriously, is the feature list for the calendar `app':

"View the current month, press right or left to view the next or previous month."

BWAH HA HA HA... *sigh*

"Touch-enabled controls--Get fast, easy access to information and entertainment with simple touch controls embedded in the display"

This is referring to some buttons around the bezel of the screen and is just so untrue they would have to change the marketing campaign in Europe or get sued. This does however remind me of the old In Living Color sketch where the handcapped superhero always says he is `not handicapped, but HANDY-CAPABLE!'.

"Videos--Watch home movies and video clips in full screen - Its simple!"

It's as simple as taking your video, recompressing it to a supported video codec, resizing it to a specific resolution, and then physically transferring it ot the device -so simple grandma could do it! (with gordian knot, virtualdub, CCCP, and all those other video tools she has)



The Screen
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Resolution

The thing is a frickin' 300 dollar photo frame, but it's resolution is 800 x 480, this equates to 0.38 megapixels, at the time the frame came out, the average cheap point n shoot ranks 9 to 10 megapixels: this is well over twenty times the resolution of the screen!

Because of this, it can take 10 full seconds to load a photo and downsample it to 800 pixels from it's original resolution. This makes browsing photos a pain, and loading photos from your camera cards nearly useless. Power users will use photoshop or xnView to batch all their content to 800 pixels.

There is aliasing galore, as 800 pixels is the resolution of many phones and handheld devices, not 13' photo frames!

NOTE: The official specs on the HP website and elsewhere say the DreamScreen 130 is 800 x 480, however, it's own documentation on the CD is came with claims a resolution of 1280 x 800. I called HP and they confirmed the lower resolution for the DreamScreen 130. There may be a middle road as some sites report: "13.3' Widescreen- 800 x 480 pixels upscaling to 1280 x 800 pixels", which would mean you purchased a 1280×800 screen and they didnt feel like making the software go higher res for the more expensive display. Jesus.


Color Reproduction

It is a cheap TN panel, the gamma of your images widely fluctuates depending on the angle they are viewed. I would be ok if they had a low resolution but used a nice IPS, SIPS, or OLED panel, but this is just unremarkable. The black point is a dark shade of grey, in all seriousness, the panel quality seems on par with something like the panels they use in the dashboard of a Prius, or other industrial UI readouts.


Streaming / Network

Streaming requires lots of Microsoft Windows Media software and services running on a PC server in your house that is always on, they relied on this instead of doing the footwork themselves. If you were under the impression from their marketing that it could read files off samba shares or work with Macintosh, you would be wrong.


Software / User Interface

The software is pretty terrible. It is very clunky and unresponsive. Many times it does not recognize that physical media has been inserted and must be rebooted. The UI graphics themselves show terrible compression artifacts.

When you bring up the on screen keyboard to type in, say, the name of the device, it clearly shows buttons like [HTTP://], [www.], [.com], and others to make it easier to browse the web, however there is no web browser! There are other places in the print ads and UI itself that refer to features the device just does not have!


"Touch Screen"

The device claims to have a `touch sensitive screen', and IT DOES! A small area around the bezel of the screen has botons that can be pressed/touched! This product is in NO WAY a touch screen device, and has no touch sensitivity, other than the buttons on the bezel, the marketing is a lie.


Open Source?

On the CD that ships with it, they have a ton of readme files showing they used a lot of GPL'd code, however the source installer did not work on my windows 7, x64.
Conclusion

Pros:

* They used Linux and GPL'd code so they will have to release theirs soon, hopefully it will be taken under the wing of the open source community and all these issues can be fixed by hard working college students and kids in their spare time.
* The packaging/box is very high quality with a great look and feel

Cons:

* The screen is low res and low quality
* The device is way overpriced for the quality of it's screen and software
* The docs and UI refer to features that just do not exist
* No battery, it must always remain plugged into the wall
* Super-glossy, all you may be seeing is windows!
* Software-wise, the average cellphone is vastly superior in extensibility and quality (browsing photos, playing mp3s, videos...)
* The UI looks like a rip of cell phone UIs, but only in pictures... There are no smooth animated transitions, nothing in common with the user interfaces they seemed to want to copy. To an experienced person, the UI feels like something HP outsourced to Asia and sent them a poor art-bible of the end product they were expecting...
* The device seems unfinished

Photos look great on this and the widgets seem to work pretty well, though you're restricted to those that HP wanted to install. No Flickr? But there are serious problems here. Everything takes a LONG time. Opening up Settings seems to take much of a minute (okay, closer to 15 seconds). It's slow. And the user interface? It looks like it was designed to be a touch screen interface but then that turned out to be too expensive. So you're always scrolling around the screen getting to exit and open buttons. It's pretty painful.

Pros:
- Looks nice
- Good resolution
- The Internet Radio bit seems to work well

Cons:
- SLOW!!!
- Only the widgets that HP wants
- Dreadful and painful user interface, you're just going to be unhappy working with it
- Bugs all over the place (radio station genres, spelling errors, sometimes the slideshow button works, other times it doesn't)

I'd wait for version two of this. Let the bugs get fixed, have them improve the user interface, get some more widget options, and install a faster processor. Then it'll be worth something like the asking price.

I got this for my mom as a Christmas present. I got her a Westinghouse 14 inch frame a couple of years ago and that set the size bar pretty high. With the HP Dreamscreen I hoped to improve upon the previous frame in several areas.

With the previous frame, found that having a digital frame is a lot of work if you have to change out the pictures on a memory card all the time - especially if you don't live near your parents. So I was hoping to find a way to do this remotely. The Snapfish option sounded promising (but why no flickr, photobucket or imageshack?). Facebook seemed sketchier to me, as Facebook already crunches your photos when you upload them and doesn't even present them THAT well on a PC screen.

We finally settled on the snapfish option and save the images at 800x480 and that works very well. I am very pleased with the images on the screen. The odd size is a bit of a problem, but overall the images look great and are crisp and bright.

Pandora radio is pretty cool. The sound is above average but it only goes so loud and starts to get tinny at higher volumes. It is a neat "gee-whiz" feature though. I haven't played with HP radio yet.

Facebook has been buggy for me. I even updated to the latest firmware when I fired the frame up for the first time (and another bright spot was that the frame logged onto my wi-fi flawlessly and easily.) But Facebook is SLOW and the pictures don't look great from Facebook, as I suspected they would not. The Facebook feature would actually make the frame worth buying for that alone if only those pictures were better quality.

The remote control works well, the controls are ok. Not great, but there are worse out there.

I spent a bit of time trying to change the slideshow settings for the Snapfish account before I realized that you have to be in the PHOTOS section. Press options there and you change the transition, length of time each photo shows on the frame and various photo options for ALL of the different modules (facebook, snapfish, etc...)

One good point to HP is the packaging. When you open the frame, it is almost like opening a jewelry case. The box is well designed and everything inside is protected nicely and the presentation is outstanding. If the product lived up to the packaging it would get 5 stars all the way! As it is, I would rate this as 3 stars if you are looking for more than a picture frame, but as a wireless digital frame, it is a five star unit and it has exceeded my expectations.

After reading some of the reviews, I had low expectations. This is a great piece of gear. It really is no slower than your home pc would be. It is a great device for streaming music, photos, etc. The internet radio is worth the price. Hook to your stereo system and listen to hundreds of stations, many with cd quality. If you have a home network set up this is nothing else that compares. I have owned mine for only a couple of weeks and there have been 2 firmware upgrades which added enhanced features.

Sadly, the digital photo frame market is mostly flooded with no-name products that are seriously lacking in several areas. One would expect a "world class" company like HP could offer a much better product, but so far as several others have reported in their reviews, HP has largely failed. This product looks great on paper but is disappointing in reality.

Consider this: You can buy (from HP no less) a very nice complete netbook computer with a better higher resolution screen, a much faster processor, WiFi, a full keyboard, expensive Li-Ion battery, hard drive, etc. for the SAME PRICE as this photo frame which has none of those things. So why does HP use a substandard 800 pixel display that makes your photos fuzzy? Why do they use a little toy processor that makes everything so slow as to be painful? Why isn't there a motion detector to turn the frame off when nobody has been in the room for a while to save energy?

Why also, isn't this device UPnP-AV or DLNA compliant so it can automatically pull pictures off your PC, NAS or home server? Other less expensive devices offer this functionality. The "internet" features of this device are severely limited. You can buy devices at a third of the price that do much more (but granted have a smaller screen). And you can buy devices at a third of the price with a better, higher resolution screen, than the DreamScreen.

I would suggest waiting until more companies figure out the "high end" digital frame market. There are new wireless offerings from Buffalo, D-Link and others that conform to home media standards (UPnP and/or DLNA) that put the DreamScreen to shame and can do much more. Hopefully such competition will force HP, and others, to get their act together.

I bought this screen and overall, despite the many shortcomings the other reviewers described (most of which I agree with), I really like it. But one major problem renders it more trouble than it is worth for me - the WiFi connection is entirely unreliable. If I run the Weather app it will *always* connect to my WiFi network and update. Status always shows it connected. Yet if I leave the weather app on it updates sometimes and other times it just stops refreshing entirely and won't reconnect until I exit and re-enter the Weather app. I of course have the latest software installed. The interesting thing is, a friend of mine bought the same screen at the same time and is having the same problem - makes you wonder huh? So I called HP and spoke to a friend person name "Sam" somewhere overseas. Nothing against Sam but obviously he had a sheet he was working from and the sheet told him to tell me to Reset the Screen to Default Settings. I did that. It doesn't help. I tried to tell Sam this but feedback of this nature isn't part of the script and I have no doubt it didn't make it back to an engineering group somewhere. I suspect resetting to default software doesn't help because there is a bug in the screen software/firmware where when it can't get a connection it simply doesn't retry - but that's just my guess. Bottom line, the connectivity issues really makes the screen more trouble than it's worth. I want the Weather to always just refresh every 10 minutes like it's supposed to but 3-4 times a day I have to go manually refresh it (and when I do manually it connects 100% of the time).

I bought this to loop video and PowerPoint slides (as images) at trade shows. And for that it works great. SD videos look great and so do images and the sound is nice and loud.

One reviewer said that the interface is slow, and I agree. You hit a button and wait and then you wonder "did that work" then it works. For me this is not a problem, because it is something I set up and then I just let it run all day, but I can imagine that trying to navigate Facebook would be difficult. Sometimes, when you put an SD card in it, it asks you what you want to do (play the videos, view the pictures, etc.) which is nice, but it doesn't always do that for some reason and you have to navigate to it.

Another issue is that the screen is a non standard ratio 1280 X 800 (16:10) instead of 16:9, and i can ever seem to claim all that real estate for the media I am using. There are always black bars on the sides. And it would be nice if it supported HD movies. But the SD movie and the images look so good that it's not a big deal.

Oh yeah, and I think the product was packaged in an "unusual smells" farm. When I opened the box, a stink came out that was truly amazing. I still have the box and it still smells (the stink on the product wore off).

The design factor is great - this thing just looks superb - it is very 'apple- like' and fits right in. The touch frame function is cool and the remote is very effective and stores away in a slot on the back of the frame.
Everything is set up very easily including the wi-fi, which took about 30seconds to find our network. We had already set up our Snapfish and Pandora accounts and they both work really well.
You can e mail straight into your account and see the new pictures very quickly. There is also Snapfish iPhone app. which allows you to send multi pictures at one time - great. This would be useful for anyone who wants to send pictures home while they are away. There are a number of ways to show the calendar or use the alarm too and all very easy to use. We also love the weather feature for it's ease of operation.
The sound is adequate but we decided to have a line out to our Onkyo i-pod music doc nearby and the sound is amazing.
We have a new iMac computer - so the streaming deal does not work but we knew that kind of, before we bought it. We hoped that HP would offer an update and we e-mailed and spoke to HP but as of now they have NO plans to update the software to make the Dreamscreen Mac - compatible. This is short sighted of HP because there's almost nothing out there which is able to stream from a Mac.
Some reviewers have complained that they can't access framechannel or picassa or other stuff but then maybe they need a 'tablet' machine and not a digital photo frame. Stop moaning!...This thing looks good and it works really well. We think that it is well featured and a great size (forget all those 7" screens)but it should be able to stream from a Mac.

I see some hard core tech guys giving this unit a hard time. I understand their comments and would only suggest they consider the targeted buyer. This is the best network connected picture frame avaialble for the price $200 @ Costco. I would never suggest a digital frame this is not networked. 95% of the folks that buy this unit will be thrilled with it's performance, I am. Some more robust networking features would be nice. But it installs easy, performs nicely, and will really enjoy it. I highly recommend it, and as a elec eng and a fairly techy dude, this is a good recomendation.

Lots of people stated they were disappointed with this product because it is not a tablet computer. Well, who said it was? Certainly not HP and certainly not Amazon. In fact, one of the biggest detractors was a person who IS (about to) produce a Tablet PC and was somehow misled into think this was competition.
The DreamScreen is a web-connected screen device, and a very elegant, good looking one at that.
It carries weather (anywhere in the world), Pandora tunes, web radio stations, and more, lots more.
It is capable of streaming photos from other computers or from its SD slot and will also play movies directly from an SD card. It also has its own on-board storage.
I have written a full review with unboxing photos on my blog at: -
[...]
I invite potential buyers to red my notes on this product and see and read about the great piece of equipment you will be securing for yourself.
While there, perhaps I can encourage you to read more of the blog and make it one of your favorites?