Customer Reviews

HP df1010b3 10.4-Inch Digital Picture Frame

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(23)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

I purchased one of these for my mother's birthday. Being as she is not very tech savy, I had to setup the frame for her. I find this frame to be great, setup was fast and easy, drag and drop pictures from my computer onto the frame (I could fit a lot of pictures due to the large internal memory). The resolution of the frame is great pictures show up clearly. And the wood housing matches great with the wood cabinet it sits on. Overall very satisfied with this picture frame and would recommend to anyone looking to purchase a digital frame.

I bought two of these frames for Christmas gifts for my 75 year old mother in law and my brother, who are both technically challenged.

Pros:
-The size of the pictures and the quality are wonderful.
-Pictures are luscious and vibrant.
-The color is bright, the auto-resizing works well.
-Price for this 10.4" is equal to the 8" Sony (also a top-end frame)
-mp3 player!
-2G of internal memory for the same price as the HP 1010A3 (512k)

Cons
-The "random" option does not work. at all.
-Pictures are a challenge to load. I have also now spent 3 hours and 2 calls to HP Customer Service trying to copy photos onto this picture frame.
-You can only transfer multiple pictures via a USB connection. If you want to load pictures from a camera's SD card, they need to be copied ONE at a TIME. I wanted to pre-load 350 or so pictures of grand kids for my mother-in-law. (What a neat present for Christmas!)
-Because this frame is so new, there are no drivers available online. My computer didn't recognize the frame as a device, so on my first call to HP, I was told, "Sorry, you'll need to copy each picture individually." My second call was more helpful. We managed to get the frame recognized, where it cycled in and out of my computer every 5 seconds.

I'm giving up. Mother-in-law is getting a Ceiva, brother-in-law probably a Pandigital, I know those work.

Overall the picture frame and display quality are very good. I wanted a digital picture frame that could turn itself on and off during certain times and show my pictures in random order. That way I don't waste electricity with having it run all night and during the day when I'm at work. Basically I just want to set this up then just have it run on its own, turning itself on when we are at home and randomly showing pictures from our picture collection. Although I set the time on the unit and enabled the automatic on and off feature, the unit would stay on all the time. And then every time I would turn it off then on the next day, the pictures would show in the order they are stored in the internal memory. I found I had to go back into the settings each time and turn shuffle mode off, then back on again to get it to start showing the pictures in random order. I find it very frustrating to have to have to do a work-around for something that should work as advertised. HP tech support advised me that I had a defective unit and to exchange it. The replacement unit turns on and off like it should, however I have to keep going back in to the settings and turning the shuffle mode off then back on to get the setting to work. If they offered a firmware upgrade I could do (like most products do) I would rather that, but since that's not possible looks like I have to return this one also.

As has been noted before, the slideshow often fails to recognize settings such as shuffle unless you go back into the menu and reselect it (it appears as being selected when you go in to make your selection, but won't be reflected in the operation of the frame unless re-selected).

One thing I had not seen pointed out is that because the buttons are on the back of the frame, if you flush mount it on a wall, you cannot access the buttons. Worse yet, there is no power button on the remote (that I could find), so its impossible to turn it off/on without taking it off the wall. I bought it for this purpose, so that's pretty frustrating.

Nevertheless, the picture quality is good with a wide horizontal viewing angle. The vertical viewing angle is not quite as wide, but is satisfactory.

This item is definitely not worth the MSRP, but at the considerable discount Amazon has been offering, its not a horrible deal.

Updated 5/1/10
I went back to Frys, and swapped for a different unit, same model DF1010. It turns out the 2nd unit suffers from the same problem, does not power up as programmed. Sent email to HP asking what's going on, and they suggested resetting the unit, and if the unit still does not power up by itself, just return it to the store. Excellent idea!
So today, I am bringing it back to Frys for full refund. I am disappointed at HP. QA needs to significantly beef up before launching, reputation is worth more than just quick sale. I am checking into Kodak or Sony. If anyone has a suggestion of an excellent digital frame, please send to my attention at [...].

Updated 4/19/10
I just discovered the digital frame does not power up automatically when programmed Enable ON. The power-off mode works however.
Secondly, the photos don't appear to be random, and there is no function that you can set to do this.

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Bought this DF1010B3 from Frys Electronics. Love the discounted price. First of all, the picture looks vibrant and detailed, with 800x600 Resolution... nice! The wood frame mahogany perfectly matches our cabinet. Power consumption of less than 18 watts, what can be better, got to watch that leaky power costs. You can leave this on all day and not having to worry about $$$. I set the auto ON/OFF so the frame goes to sleep at night, and wakes up in the morning. Plugged in an SD card, and instantly I see the photos popped up. Has generous 2GB of internal memory. I can use my external USB flash card or SD card as well. The front panel glass is solid and looks as if real picture, unlike those picture frames when you touch, you can see fluid in motion around the finger. I can get rid of all the other static paper picture frames cluster.

What I see as future improvements:
1. Photos automatically load in when a camera is connected. Currently you can only load the photos via USB connected to a PC. Don't need to fiddle around with a PC for photo upload. Simplify things!

2. Music plays when in quad mode. Currently I can only hear music when in single photo mode.

3. Quad mode offers the ability to display all 4 photos instead of calendar/ time, mixed mode.

4. Wifi Internet connection to over the Internet radio. This would obsolete the music loading. I would be able to select the channel of music to my taste ... all free on the internet radio.

5. Touch screen LED panel. This would give the ability to navigate things right on the screen. The important thing here is keep costs down while integrating this feature.

Will write more as I use along.

Saw this frame on Amazon and immediately liked it. Purchased one on the spot for $59.99 and got it 2 days later (Amazon Prime Shipping).

Pros:
-The frame took around 5 minutes to assemble, link to the computer and download a few photos and mp3s. Anyone remotely comfortable with working with flash drives would be able to understand photo/mp3 loading without even reading the manual.
-I loaded 10Megapixel images as well as ones sized to 1024x768. The frame could display both sizes, though it took a couple of seconds to load the 10MP images.
-The picture quality is great for the size/price offered.
-It has a slideshow mode with MP3 playback in the background with sufficient volume and quality.
-I also loaded a .avi movie file on the frame, and that played as well!
-I can use it as just an mp3 player and blank out the screen, which is useful when putting my niece to sleep :)

Cons:
- As someone has already mentioned, the shuffle setting doesn't save across power cycles. I mean, the setting still shows as 'shuffle on' after I switch on the device, but the shuffle doesn't work... I have to 'shuffle off' and again 'shuffle on' for it to work.
- When the slideshow is progressing, there is no way to change the mp3 track that is playing. And there is no randomness in track selection possible. Every time I start a slideshow, it starts playing track1 and then continues down the line.

I haven't had them for very long, so I cannot comment on the longevity of the frames, but I trust HP quality will not let me down.

While there are cons, they weren't significant enough for me, so I am happy with the frame. In fact, I recently purchased 2 more for family.

All in all, a product I would recommend for buyers looking for good features and a low price.

I just bought the smaller version of the df1010, the df820, same features. My elderly mother can use a remote and I can provide the photos on a USB flash drive. After separating hundreds of photos from my computer to folders according to subject (wedding, trip 1, trip 2, picnic 1, picnic 2, etc) I found that the unit does not recognize the different folders on the drive and proceeds to read through the folders one-by-one, placing all photos into one psuedo folder. Maybe it's just me, but what purpose does this thing serve if you cannot separate photos into subjects (i.e. folders)? We have thousands of photos--must she click through all of them to find a particular set? For all the good engineering in this unit, the lack of this simple feature negates its usefullness. I am returning the unit tomorrow for a refund.

I got this frame for my Chinese in-laws who don't speak any English. I found that the onscreen instructions/menus could not be translated in to Chinese, which is a shame as the the frame is not bad apart from that. I thought I would call customer service to find out two things: (a) if a firm ware upgrade might support Chinese (b) if any of there other (even more expensive frames) would support Chinese menus etc... The support guy wouldn't even allow me to finish explaining, just cut me off with a flat out "NO", when I tried to ask if any other frames supported Chinese, again he cut me off with an grumpy "NO". I then said something like "thats a shame because..." (I was going to add I liked the product), he cuts me off with "This is the USA, we dont speak Chinese", and pretty much hung up on me.

This product is an pretty good frame, just hope you don't have to call customer services.

I've had this frame for about couples of week now and so far I love it. I've owned a Kodak model before (M1020) before, and the HP one is definitely better.

HP's df1010b3 has a 10.4" with a 4:3 aspect ratio, offering a screen almost 1/4 larger than the Kodak frame, while displaying all my photos without any cropping (something you can't expect from a 16:9 LCD). It comes with the standard features like slideshow with music, playback of videos captured by your digital camera, mp3 player, clock and calendar...and so on. The 2GB internal memory is bigger than most I have seen in the market, that I no longer need to keep an extra SD card in the frame for storage. The clock/calendar for this model is pretty neat too because it has a function allowing you to split the screen in 4 parts and offers you different display options: 2 photos with calendar and clock, 3 photos with calendar only...etc.

What I love the most though is the df1010b3's ability to display panoramic photos. I go hiking a lot, and my Sony camera has the "panoramic stitching" function that can fuse several consecutive photos together to form a nice panoramic photo, perfect for scenery shots. The df1010b3, quite amazingly, has a viewing mode that can detect panoramic photos, and display them by showing one end of the photos then panning slowly left and right across the screen to show the rest of it. I have yet to see something like this on any other digital frame.

I've read other complaints about the programmable on/off. Personally I don't use it much so it doesn't bother me much, but when I did use it, it work perfectly fine, it comes on at exact time I set it to come on and the exact time to go off at night.

Of course it doesn't hurt that the df1010b3 comes with a nice, solid and beautiful mahogany real wood frame, along with the matching double-layered mat. Many frame out there does not use real wood, some even use plastic. It sits perfectly on my desk and I love enjoying my hiking photos on it from time to time when I need a break from staring at my computer.

Not bad for people who don't want or need a widescreen format. Pros: Nice size, decent price (on sale through Amazon) and great picture. I was on the fence about the price but the 2 GB of internal memory was the deciding factor. I like being able to load a lot of pictures without having to leave a flash drive or memory card plugged in. It even comes with a remote control to change things from a distance. Cons: some things can only be done with the remote and mass copying to/from a computer proved to be difficult, almost painful. After adding a few test pictures via flash drive and the remote, deleteing them in mass from the computer connection left the internal memory locked up. After cycling power, the internal memory didn't have any pictures but was full of the same number of solid gray images that had to be deleted (could only be deleted...) via the remote (one at a time) and only after adding some other new pictures. May have been a glitch but won't know until the next time I try it again. Once you have pictures loaded the unit performs well and has some bell & whistle features that didn't appeal to me personally but can add some extra flair for those interested.
The unit can accept many types of memory cards and comes with a white cardboard border installed between the screen and the outer wood frame but the box also includes a black version that can be swapped for the white one. This is my first digital picture frame and after all is said and done, it's a nice unit and I'm happy with the purchase.