Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5 of 5 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
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
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8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Terrible design makes product unusable., October 3, 2008
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.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful. Easy. Skimpy on features., December 26, 2008
I picked up this frame for $250 at Fry's. The nice thing was, I could physically view the frame at the retailer before I bought it to judge the image quality (unlike the Digital Spectrum frames).
PROS:
- Very nice image quality. 1024x768, which is plenty for a 15" frame (I know, I was surprised, too!) Colors are vivid and sharp.
- Easy to connect to WiFi, including WEP security.
- Silent.
- Comes with included WiFi USB dongle! Pandigital will charge you $50 more for the same size frame, and another $30 for the USB WiFi dongle.
CONS:
- No brightness or contrast adjustment. This is minor since the picture visibility is excellent, even in a bright room.
- No timer to turn frame off/on automatically at night. This is huge, because after you turn the unit off, it does not restart showing pictures on power up. Instead, after powering on, you have to select the pictures to show from the main menu again.
- No shuffle option for image display sequence.
- The frame only checks for the file list of pictures ONCE every time it powers up. That means, if you add or delete or rearrange pictures on your computer or in a Picasa or Flickr album/folder, those changes won't take effect until you power cycle the frame again. And as stated above, after you power on and of the frame, you have to manually restart the display.
NOTES:
- When the frame uses WiFi to connect to your computer and Yahoo or Google, the pictures are essentially streamed to the display. The pictures are not downloaded to the frame via WiFi.
I'm going to probably take this back and get something else with more features.
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