Merkury Innovations MI-DF0856 8.5-Inch Digital Photo Frame with 1.5-Inch keychain (Silver)

by Merkury Innovations

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 3.8 x 11 x 15 inches ; 1 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 2.8 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B001D2CPB6
• Item model number: MI-DF0856
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: July 18, 2008

Product Description

Size: 8.5-Inch | Style: Black w/Silver Keychain

Merkury Innovations 8.5-inch digital photo frame displays digital photos on widescreen. The aspect ratio of screen is 16:9 or 4:3 and its resolution is 480x234 pixels. It stores up to 60 images. The pictures can be rotated/flipped horizontally or vertically. The keypad is of retractable type. The connectivity technology is usb 2.0 slot (host). It requires power supply of AC: 100 ~240V DC:12V 1.25A. It supports various memory cards. It uses rechargeable lithium battery. Computer is not required for this frame. It supports Mac (10.4 or later) and PC (Windows 98/2000/ME/XP/Vista).

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Actually a pretty good value (and not terrible at all IMHO), November 7, 2008

By 

Jay Cee (San Rafael, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Merkury Innovations MI-DF1500 15-Inch Wireless Digital Photo Frame (Black) (Electronics)

Like David - I also bought this in part for the wireless features and the capability to have it upload from Flickr and Picasa. I'm not experiencing any of the same problems. It worked as advertised on the first try out of the box and is still 2 months later. The caveat on Flickr is that for some reason it can't see more than 20 photos within a file folder group (even though you might have dozens loaded). No big deal because Picasa works fine (which I like better anyway).

I've also got it to work to upload pictures (via the wireless) stored on my desktop computer hard-drive. It's a little funky to set-up and the documentation isn't clear nor comprehensive (sucks actually), but it wasn't hard to intuitively set this up.

It's my guess David just got a bad unit.

From my experience this is a very good value and the product works well. There are some minor bugs and unlike David, I haven't had to contact support - but overall we love this frame. We have it on our wall in the kitchen and now the gazillions of digital photos are viewed and in constant rotation on this crisp large 15 inch display.

I didn't see anything out there close to this for the same money. I caught it when it was $220. Heck I think this well worth it even if you don't use the wireless (just memory cards).

I recommend it

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Terrible design makes product unusable., October 3, 2008

By 

David Stein (Cleveland, Ohio United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Merkury Innovations MI-DF1500 15-Inch Wireless Digital Photo Frame (Black) (Electronics)

I bought this product for its single differentiating feature over other picture frames: its ability to download photos from Flickr or Picasa via a wireless network connection.

There's only one problem... it can't actually download photos from the internet.

I had already created photo albums at Flickr and Picasa - nothing complicated like password protection, but just public albums. This was a completely simple setup - a single photo album containing about 30 photos, all correctly resized to match the resolution and aspect ration of the frame. But even in this simple scenario, the frame doesn't work AT ALL with EITHER service.

The first step - networking - was achievable, but painful for two reasons:

1) For a completely inexplicable reason, the wireless network adapter isn't internal. It's an external stick-shaped adapter that you pop into the sole USB port. Regrettably, that sole USB port is at the top of the frame. This ruins the appearance of the device: the classic-looking frame now sports a very awkward stick jutting out of the top. It's incredibly stupid-looking.

2) The frame has built-in support for WEP and WPA, along with auto-discovery. However, the configuration options are minimal: once you plug in the information, it tries to connect, and then either magically succeeds or comes back with an unhelpful "connection failed" message. I had to try entering my network information at least two dozen times (via a PAINFULLY SLOW keyboard activated through a left/up/right/down remote!) before I had a connection. (And since I didn't do anything different between the successful attempt and the previous failures, I strongly suspect that this frame would occasionally - perhaps often - require its user to jump through these hoops, over and over again.)

In the end, I was able to connect to my wireless network. Unfortunately, further progress was impossible.

* It simply can't even find the Picasa server. The frame just stalled at every attempt to locate it.

* It found the Flickr server fine, and it allowed me to input a username. The main menu of the frame then displayed a grid and tried to download the list of photo albums from the Flickr account... without success. It just stalled while trying to retrieve the folder list. I tried at least a dozen times - tried rebooting the machine, reconnecting to the network, re-entering the Flickr photo group name - same result every time.

Finally, in desperation, I visited Merkury's website to see if they have updated firmware available. I discovered that it's an incredibly sparse website: their customer service page - for ALL PRODUCTS - is a single "contact us" form. No drivers, no downloads, no manuals, nothing. So the chances of getting useful feedback are essentially zero.

So I wasted about three hours of my life trying to get this product to do the very simple things it's advertised to do, without success. Now I have to haul it to UPS and await my refund from Amazon. I'm writing this review to save you the same frustration and waste of time...

Bottom line: DON'T BUY THIS PRODUCT - it is defective right out of the box.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Product/Great Price, June 28, 2009

By 

Bookaholic (NC) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Merkury Innovations MI-DF0151 1.5-Inch Digital Keychain (Black) (Electronics)

good photo quality. Slightly pixilated. easy to use. I had a little trouble at first, but that was more me trying to make it harder than it was. Holds lots of pictures. Easy to use your own scanner to scan in pictures to put on. Easy editing. A friend said it had better picture quality than a more expensive item that she had bought.

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