Customer Reviews

Kodak Easyshare W1020 10-Inch Wireless Digital Frame

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(13)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

I wanted to like this product - I really did. It's a pretty case, the screen looks great, and the feature set is impressive.

But the software and documentation problems are maddening. There is PC software that you install to control the frame and load photos, slideshows, etc. This software is frustratingly buggy and never worked for me. It gave several error messages on installation; after finally installing fully, it couldn't find the frame on the network. The screen displays an error message referring you to the manual, the manual refers you to a web FAQ, and the web site points you back to the manual - kind of an amusing tail-chasing exercise. After uninstalling and reinstalling, temporarily disabling my firewall, etc., I tried their live chat support, but the technician's script evidently extended only to the most basic things that I had already tried; and when I suggested that there might be a software problem he got argumentative. There doesn't appear to be any kind of "advanced" tab in the software for example to manually enter an IP address and troubleshoot problems like this, so in some ways I sympathize, all the tech can do is advise you to reinstall the software and then he may not have anything left up his sleeve.

The frame did connect to the Internet and display my Kodak Gallery albums. So if that's all you want it for then I'd recommend it. But if you intend to use any of the advanced features, in particular controlling it wirelessly from a PC, it's a roll of the dice whether it will work for you. The one thing I would say from my experience with it is, if the software on the PC doesn't come up 100% clean and connect to the frame perfectly on your very first try, put the thing back in the box right away and give up, it's not worth hours of futzing with.

I bought the Kodak EX 811 a year ago for my parents which was a wireless 8" digital frame. Unfortantely, many of the features were not fully implemented, and overall, the frame was a disappointment. Given that Kodak has had a year to get it right, I purchased the W1020 for myself to check it out. Wow. Kodak got this one right. I have only had a chance so far to configure the wireless feature and connect it to my online gallery, so there are many other features that I have yet to try. But my first impressions are very good from the nicely implemented on screen interface with a touch panel to features that were previously not implemented like power on/off which actually starts displaying photos from any source including the online gallery. I noticed that other features that were missing in the previous version are now available like a random display option so you do not always see the photos in the same order.

I am now hoping that I can now upgrade my parent's EX 811 to the latest firmware to resolve some of the issues that the older frame had. I may write another review after I have had to chance to explore all the features of this frame, but it is looking like this frame is a real winner.

The promise of the Kodak W1020: manage your photos wirelessly from your computer, receive photos from others directly to your wireless frame, watch slide shows and videos from flickr and Kodak's site.

The reality: many hours of fighting with the software and pulling my hair out isn't worth it.

As others have said, the software (Kodak EasyShare Digital Display Software) is indeed pretty wonky and not intuitive. It often took 30 seconds or more to wait for it to load and had to be killed via Task Manager several times.

Trying to navigate to your photos within the software is maddening. It is supposed to be drag and drop once you find the photos you want. The folder tree is the same as you would see in My Computer, but when you click on a directory that has many photos, the program does not show the files or allow you to select _any_ until it has generated a thumbnail of every last one, which may take several minutes.

Slightly troubling is that there is no clear way to disable automatic searching of certain default folders (My Music, My Pictures, My Videos). If you go to Tools--Settings, "Folder" tab, you can "select folders to scan for pictures..." etc. and in the right hand column are 6 paths pointing to the My Music, My Pictures and My videos for "All Users" and the current user. You can highlight them but the "remove" button remains greyed out. We all know that there are photos on our computers not ready to be accidentally shared with the rest of the world.

Subjectively, it seems like my hard drive is spinning and grinding constantly after installing the software. After installing it, my boot time has increased by at least 30 seconds (counting from when the desktop background appears). There is no new icon in the lower right hand corner or other obvious sign of a background program, but running Task Manager and looking the Processes shows that the Kodak program is using 30,000K of memory (at startup when I haven't launched any programs at all). There is no new item in the startup folder and no option I could find in the Kodak software to _not_ have it run at startup.

The touchscreen is OK, but not great. Entering a password takes a long time as you have to scroll character by character. The frame can be unresponsive while photos are "loading" in the thumbnail mode & immediately after you click "select all", leaving you uncertain if you've hit the button or not. Also, if you tap a button that doesn't have any "files" or sub menus in it, there is no beep or other sign that you can't enter into it. So you tap it again. And again.

The Good:
The image quality is pretty good.

The Kodak Gallery (online) works pretty well once you get it set up. The multi-step process is not spelled out though:
1) Create an account online (if you don't already have one)
2) login in to the the Kodak Gallery from within the Kodak Easyshare Digital display software
3) login in to the Kodak Gallery from within the frame (Region, email, password)

Anyone who wants to send you many photos can set up an account and email them to you. I created a second account and emailed photos to the first one associated with the frame. You can set the frame to have a popup showing that "Name" is sharing photos from you, and to receive them. As they are shown on the frame, you can choose to save the received photos to the frame's internal memory (save all or one at a time). If your wireless connection is always on, then the frame seems to be able to get the photos from the web every time the frame is powered on so you can manage the slideshow completely via the web. THIS is the functionality I wanted, to be able to send pics to my parents or whoever and have them just show up on the frame. Magic.

Flickr works. Sort of. You must allow the frame to access your flickr account and you can choose to view photos from individual sets, or all photos from your photostream. You have to "select all" thumbnails in the frame menu or the default is to show only the same 10-15 photos. When being set up, the software tells you that ALL photos will be accessable, including those set as PRIVATE.

You can set up to randomly go thru other people's images from flickr. It can be interesting, but I imagine the possibility of questionable content (flickr users generally do self-filter nudity, etc. but you never know).

Deleting stuff is not spelled out anywhere:
Deleting from the frame-in the Easyshare digital display software, choose the bottom option in the tree "My Devices". Delete the sample pictures or others pics that you do not want. (this does not remove the sample pictures brought in via the website). Albums on the Kodak website must be deleted via the website (the albums will be removed from the frame after you power down and restart frame).

I didn't use Framechannel except for the built in buttons for weather, news etc. It apppears to be supported by the occasional advertisement along with the content they provide.

I didn't use a direct connection to computer via USB cable or plug in USB or SD cards, so can't comment on how well they work. I got the frame because I wanted a _wireless_ setup.

I will be returning this item. I really wish the software was better, the frame itself is pretty and had a lot of promise. Perhaps the next generation will be ready for next years' holiday season.

Background
- Purchased this frame for my parents to automatically get updated pictures of the grandchildren.
- I'm an experienced PC user/software developer
- My parents have a computer, DSL, email, but limited computer skills. I thought this would allow me to deliver pictures right to their living room on a regular basis.

My Experiences setting it up and testing
- The border touch and menu system was very intuitive and more tactically accurate than many of the touch screens I've used.
- Loading pictures from external memory card was simple
- Picture quality was excellent and better than expected considering I was concerned about the 16/9.
- Configuring WiFi access relatively simple including security configuration
- Kodak EasyShare desktop software -- I couldn't get it to load on my Windows XP machine. Froze up multiple times during installation process and when I finally got a "successful" install, the software would crash each time I ran it.
- But for my purposes I was able to completely to configure the frame directly through the frame menu system and through the web browser access to the frame directly from my PC. This mainly was setting up access to the internet (Kodak web site, news and weather)
- I have it now setup where they turn it on and it (after ~30 seconds) starts showing pictures I have loaded onto the Kodak web site. I can load this folder remotely and viola my parents will have the latest pictures each time they turn on the frame.
- Video and Sound - I didn't try anything other than the samples that came with it and they looked/sounded great.

Conclusion:
The much talked about software issues will likely cause a problem if your needs are to directly access files from a PC, but otherwise it is a great frame.

My parents experience
TBD

I bought this as a very early Christmas present for my parents, thinking that they would need my help to set it up. I was blown away by how easy it was to setup. Within 10 minutes of unpacking the frame, I had pictures from my Kodak Gallery account displayed on the frame.

Although the interface isn't perfect, it works the way it was intended and is fairly intuitive. The touch sensors on the border of the frame allow for an easy (and somewhat cool) mechanism to navigate around the frame.

I read reviews about poor image quality, but I personally found the image quality to be outstanding. Even from across the room, the pictures were bright and sharp. I have never before written a review about a product, but I was so pleasantly surprised by this frame that I felt I had to.

So far, my parents love the gift. I can remotely upload pictures to KodakGallery, and within minutes it shows up on their frame.

Just bought the Kodak W1020 and it far exceeds my expectations. Picture quality is best I've seen and you have 4 options to show digital pictures: SD/MMC card, Via 802.11 Wireless network to your PC picture library, pictures copied to the frame, and from pictures published on the internet. You can also set up some very neat Internet RSS feeds to show you weather forecasts and traffic updates. You can even set this thing up to turn itself on and off at specific times. We've got ours setup to come in the morning on work dayo show us the weather and traffic conditions. You'll need to setup a free account on Framechannel.com to access the RSS feeds and it takes a bit of manipulation to really figure out how to customize them to your hearts desire. It will also play music although the speakers are not exactly high fidelity, still you can do and it can access mp3 files from all 4 sources. The only trick is that to completely configure the frame you will have to load the s/w from Kodak and use it to connect to the frame; all easily done.. but as always the manual is not very specific on what you can do from what interface. The user interface on the frame is very easy to use .. but using the keyboard is tedious as you can only scroll left and right via the button interface so working your way through the keyboard is one long process as you go from row to row. If you don't need the wireless features and just want to show show pictures.. I'd probably not buy this. I would not give to say.. my elderly parents as it pretty sophisticated and too complicated for them to want to mess with. That being said.. we love this thing and it is the most innovative electronic gadget I've seen in quite some time. It is an absolutely cool device and is an amazing media viewer. THe frame is well constructed and well made. My kids already dropped it and it has survived thus far. The ac power cord is bit short if you intend to hang it on a wall, but works good enough for coffee tables. The user interface buttons on the frame disappear completely when you are not messing with them which .. again.. is just cool. Can you tell I highly recommend this! A definite cool present!

On the surface this looked like a great product having several wireless networking features to provide connectivity to a variety of online and network sources.

Unfortunately, after purcasing the W1020, it became apparent that the wireless feature was poorly designed as the wireless connectivity drops after a few minutes and the frame must be powered off/on to reconnect.

Kodak support was worthless as they had me going in circles moving the frame around and reloading the firmware, then stopped responding in chat. I have over 10 years of experience in wireless networking and this was clearly a design issue in the W1020 frame.

UPDATE: Kodak recently pushed out a firmware update that corrected the wireless connectivity issue. It now stays connected as expected. However, after my experience with customer support, it's unlikely I'll purchase any more products from Kodak.

I bought this picture frame as a gift for a relative. Since she is not really computer savvy, the idea was I could set up this frame in her house, and then I could remotely add pictures to a flickr account and have them automatically download from flickr to her frame (added to her current slideshow) without her doing a thing. I chose this particular frame because it explicitly touts flickr integration, and I thought Kodak products were more geared towards simplicity over unneeded functionality. So far I am very disappointed.
- Integration with flickr is deceptively simple, but it does not work. I have a photostream on flickr, and I recently got the frame to download and show a few pictures from it. But ever since I added more pictures to flickr, the frame says I no longer have a photostream. Others have complained of similar problems. Google 'kodak frame flickr problems' to get to the flickr forums on this topic.
- The Kodak easyshare software that gets installed on your pc is junk. Poorly documented and slow, the frame itself should be the single source of configuration data.
- The firmware on the frame is somewhat buggy and slow. It's not a deal breaker, but it should be rock solid. The frame will display a slide show for a few days, and then mysteriously get stuck on the 'Home' screen. I am unsure if this is due to it dropping the wireless connection, as others have reported. I am using a Linksys WRT54GL router that is within 150ft of the frame.

Right now the frame is set up to display a static slideshow that I set up at her house. I am not fully using the wireless capabilities. I am not using the flickr integration capabilities. For the features I am using, I could have gotten a much cheaper frame. If you really must have flickr and wireless, I recommend a different frame, or waiting until the issues with this frame have been worked out.

I own the 10" wireless version. I installed the latest firmware as of 1/6/2009 and the latest software update for the PC software.

If you have a secure network, then you will run into firewall issues between the PC and the Frame if you want to "Drag and Drop" photos from your PC to the Frame, or if you want to serve up photos to the frame from your PC (client/server mode - your PC has to be on all the time to serve the photos).

If you are firewall saavy then you might not have too much trouble. Kodak doesn't tell you which ports it wants open (other than all of them). And "allowing" the PC application that comes bundled with the frame to have free access through the network doesn't always seem to work (I had to shut McAfee firewall down, even though I allowed the Kodak software an exception... on my other computer with Windows firewall the exception worked fine... except with pairing the frame with FrameChannel, see below... and I'm still not sure how I got that working).

FrameChannel setup is difficult at best. It requires some luck and magic. You have to pair the Frame to your PC, then access FrameChannel from the Web UI or PC App that comes bundled with the frame, then click on the FrameChannel logo and set up/log into your account. I did this 500 times but the frame would not pair. I'd use the frame interface (which has more config options than the web interface for the frame) and select FrameChannel, and the Frame would tell me it was not connected to the network, and to go to settings > network and connect it to the network, even though I could ping the Frame, and the web UI worked fine at the same time it was telling me it was not on the network! I finally got it to work, somehow, after many reboots of the frame, wall-punching, firewall tweaking, cursing, etc. The instructions are not clear to say the least. If the frame pops up a validation code then you know you are almost there. If I could retrace my steps of finally getting the frame paired with FrameChannel, I would explain it here, but I tried so many things over so many hours I'm going to chock it up to luck.

Come to find out, the FrameChannel service has a bunch of ads it likes to show on your frame. I wouldn't bother with FrameChannel, save yourself the grief. My wife looked at it and said "It's like we are at a bank waiting in line, you see some photos, a news headline, the weather, an advertisement...". I don't know about you, but I don't want to see advertisements in my living room.

(Note: Yes, I'm bitter about the whole framechannel configuration issues I had. I am a programmer and I work on enterprise networking software... wireless, wired, VOIP, SIP, Video, etc. I configure that stuff for a living. A Kodak frame should be a cake walk, right? Needless to say I wouldn't buy this for someone with limited computer experience if they wanted to use FrameChannel).

The PC software that comes bundled with the frame will crash a lot. It will bring a modest laptop with decent computing power to its knees as it searches your harddrive for photos. It also doesn't tell you it is searching your hard drive for photos, and you may wonder why your PC slowed down so much right after you installed the software... if it didn't crash. If the software crashed then your PC will run just fine.

If you have a uPnP AV server (universal plug and play), this frame will see it, but will then freeze/lock up and you will watch a little hourglass spin until you reboot the frame. It will happen over and over again. I had to turn off the uPnP AV server on my D-Link 323 NAS or the frame would keep freezing up. uPnP support is not listed as a supported feature, but it is not listed as a limitation either.

What I hoped I would be able to do is "easily" create multiple slide shows and RSS feeds and have the Frame randomly pull photos from all those streams of photos. You can't do that really.

You can upload a bunch of photos to the Frame, and use those as a slide show. You can configure multiple slideshows, but you can only watch one at a time, if you want a different slide show then you have to get up, walk to the frame, push the magic buttons, and select a different one. (You cannot change the shows from the Web UI, you actually can't do a whole lot from the web UI...) Now, walking to the frame isn't really a big deal, but come one... the Frame is a computer for all intents and purposes. Why can't you mix and match a bunch of different photo streams "easily"?

If you want to watch a photo feed from Flickr, then you have to walk up to the frame, select the flickr feed, then let it play.

Granted, you can use FrameChannel to mix and match feeds and photos that you upload to FrameChannel, but you will get some ads, and you can't mix and match those with photos you uploaded directly to the frame. I already have a ton of photos servable from my home network. I don't want to upload them someplace else, so they can then be sent down from the internet back to the frame. Mix and match of photo streams is not easy with this frame.

The web UI is limited as I said before. You can do some configuration, but you can't switch slide shows, etc. You need to do all that from the frame itself. You should be able to do everything from the frame and from the web UI. Scrolling through images or entering text on the frame is a major pain. Using the bundled software is a bigger pain.

If you are really tech saavy you can get it to do what you want. What I ended up doing was reconfigured my DNS-323 NAS as a web server, wrote some PHP scripts that generated RSS feeds for any photos that I or my wife throw into some folders (also on the NAS), then configured the frame for a single RSS feed, which points at my NAS. I can even tie in some Flickr RSS feeds if I want, or some basic news/weather feeds, etc. I don't have to upload any photos anyplace other than the NAS box, and I don't have to see ads from FrameChannel. So... I pretty much had to code up my own version of FrameChannel. Which was fun to be honest, but not how I planned to spend an evening. If you are not a programmer, and don't have a network backup box that is on all the time anyway that can serve up the photos... you may want to walk away from this one.

But, if you just want to copy some photos to the frame and that's it, or just use it for your Kodak Gallery pictures, then this is a great(but pricey) frame. 4 stars, 5 if it were cheaper.

If you want to use all the bells and whistles. Get ready for some frustration. 2 stars. Maybe 3? No, not after the FrameChannel fiasco. 2 stars.

I'm looking forward to some firmware updates to say the least :) Maybe they will fix some of the usability issues. Maybe not.

I initially purchased this frame running Vista. Recently I did an install of Windows 7. I immediately found out that not only was Windows 7 not compatible with the Digital Frame software for the W1020 but it irrevocably crashed my machine causing me to need to do a completely new intall. Kodak knew the software was a problem with Windows 7 because they had a "cleaner" to remove it. Despite the cleaning I still needed to reinstall. I have sent numerous inquiries to Kodak and have been given the run-around. There is no digital frame software for the W1020 and Windows 7 and it is unclear when , if ever, there will be software available. Kodak seems to care less as they were less than helpful in resolving the issue or answering timeline questions. I now have a paperweight frame that plays media cards but cannot communicate with my PC which is what I bought it for. Totally worthless. I would not reccommend this to anyone or any Kodak product for that matter.