Customer Reviews

Mustek PF-A700B 7-Inch Multimedia Digital Photo Viewer

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(23)
3 star:		(15)
2 star:		(12)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

I bought this as a Black Friday special to give as a Christmas present. So far, FOR THE PRICE, I am pretty happy with the frame. I also picked up a SanDisk 1GB sd card to use in the frame to store images on. Here's my thoughts so far:
1) The frame is pretty intuitive to operate, I was able to get it up and running without reading the directions.
2) I suppose having a usb drive sticking out of the frame would be noticeable but the sd card and compact flash cards are not noticeable when inserted, so go drop $15 on an SD card and be done with it. As for the item not having any internal memory, that was a trade-off that Mustek made to achieve a lower price-point. Personally, I like the flexibility of just being able to pop the SD card out and throw it in my computer's card reader.
3) Yes the native resolution appears to be 480x342. If you have tons of photos to resize Microsoft has an "image resizer" powertoy that will let you resize them all at once for free at [...] To keep the correct aspect ratio, resize the pictures to 456x342 or 480x360 and then crop out 18 pixels on the top or bottom. The reason for the resizing of the pictures is twofold: a) you fit more pictures on a card this way and b) smaller pictures have no delay in load time (i.e., you don't have to wait for pictures to load, after picture A has been displayed for 5 seconds (or whatever interval you choose) picture B loads right away, whereas large pictures take additional time to load because the frame's cpu has to resize the picture itself).
4) No the frame is not as high a resolution as you would get with a laptop display, but for 1/4 the price of a laptop, an expectation that the picture would be that sharp is unrealistic.
5) Of course this item is going to have a power cord, display panels are energy hogs and having a li-ion or nimh battery for this frame that would probably only last a few hours and wear out eventually anyways would put the frame's price-point well over $100.

I'll just close by saying I am happy with this item, and I think the recipient of this gift will be happy with it as well. It irritates me that this item is getting a bad rap not because the item is bad but more because the people who purchased the item did so with unrealistic expectations.

Many reviewers have faulted this product for the quality of its display. Granted, the display is not the sharpest in the world but for the money what do you expect? This is not a computer display monitor on which you will be performing Photoshop edits -- it's a digital picture frame for snapshots! It is certainly not as sharp as my SXGA monitor, but I didn't expect it to be. When using this display, you have to start with a reasonably good image; it should be sharp and well exposed. You should also resize the image to approximately 480 x 330 pixels -- that's not critical, but larger images will take longer to load. The picture frame provides a number of options for viewing the images, including simply running through them continuously in slide show mode, which presumably will be the most popular (it's the default option). There are a considerable number of options that are selectable via menus and they range from display intervals, changing the sort order, varying the contrast and brightness, selecting the transition effect, etc. You can connect it to a TV with optional cables and it will even play MP3 files. I didn't buy this to critically evaluate my photographs -- I bought it for a relative so they could have an ever changing display of family pictures. For the price Amazon is asking, I think it's a great value.

This frame is well priced and does a good job displaying pictures if you take the time to prepare them. I bought this as a present for my friend and wanted to load some pictures on it first. It took me a while to figure out what the other reviewers were talking about when they described how they resized and cropped the pictures. I figured it out finally using Photoshop Elements 4.0. Other products will perform similarly, the basics are the same.

The default setting the frames comes set at is 4:3 ratio, so change that first in the settings to 16:9.

Then in Photoshop Elements, take the original set of photos and squeeze them using File>Process Multiple Files. In the Resize Images section, set the Width to 77% and the Height to 100% and uncheck Constrain Proportions. This will make all of your pictures look squeezed from the sides and unnatural, but that's what you need because the frame will stretch the sides back out when it displays the picture.

Now you need to crop them one by one to both cut out wasted space and set it up to use the whole frame heighth and width. In Photoshop Elements Editor, open the whole folder of your squeezed pictures and select the first picture to crop. Select the Crop Tool and in the Aspect Ratio box above your first squeezed image, choose Custom. Set the Width to 48 inches and Height to 34.2 inches (it won't let you choose 480 by 342--too high) and leave the Resolution box empty. Don't worry about those numbers, those inches are meaningless, it's the ratio of the box you want to crop with. Now you should have a nice rectangular box to crop each picuture with in the correct ratio and save the new cropped picture.

Transfer the pictures to the frame (I used an SD card) and they'll display perfectly with no distortion. Many thanks to whoever figured that out first. The frame is great when you display the pictures using the whole area.

The frame may be worth $50-60, if you are prepared to resize your images. The correct pixel number seems to be 480x342, not 234 as labeled. This is for a 16:9 aspect ratio. There is significant stretching in the final display; however, it can be overcome by first shrinking the width to 77%, then cropping the resulting image to 480x342. (I used the image resize Powertoy [free download from Microsoft] to resize to 640x480, then shrunk and cropped using Paint.) Resulting image is of reasonable sharpness, but colors look a bit washed out.

I bought this from another vendor during their Black Friday sale and I really like it. There are a few problems with it that are completely avoidable. I spent about 3 hours trying to figure out why my photos were not being displayed properly. I had formatted them to 480x234, the resolution listed on the packaging, but the screen is actually 480x342. You think the manufacturer would get the display resolution correct, but at this price who cares. I dropped in a 1 GB memory stick and I can store several thousand photos at the 480x234 resolution. I loaded two of them up with family photos and they will be great Christmas gifts. You can score this for $50 if you go to the right store.

I bought 3 of these for gifts during a Black Friday sale. I took one out to test. It seems to work very good if you size your pictures correctly. A previous reviewer was correct the resolution listed in the instructions is incorrect. The actual resolution that works with the "widescreen" display is 480x342. However even at the native resolution the picture is slightly stretched horizontally. It seems as though the shape of the pixels causes this, but with that being said , I don't believe it takes away from the picture much. There are two settings on the frame one for 16:9 and another for 4:3.

Be aware for best results you'll need to resize and crop most photos in order for them to look "right" on the display. Also, the load times for un-resized photos can be a bit annoying (even with a fast SD card).

The quality of the picture is a bit washed out, but not badly. I adjusted my contrast up one notch for a slightly better picture. More playing with the brightness and contrast settings may yield better results.

All in all this digital frame seems to work well for what I payed for it. If it hadn't been on sale, I would have considered other options.

I bought this frame because the one i wanted was out of stock (and more expensive). But this one really isn't that horrible. For $70 it can't be beat. Operating it isn't difficult, but the buttons are clumsy and annoying to use. Definitly don't use a USB card, use a SD, CF or memory card. As for the advice posted before, set the frame to 16x9 mode, crop your photos in a 1.4 width to 1 height ratio or as close as you can to use as much of the screen as possible, and resize your images to 480x342 pixels. Believe it or not, the smaller the image size the better it looks on the screen, plus it loads much faster and allows you to hold more pictures on a smaller memory card (my pics were around 43 kb after resizing). It is unfortunate that it won't play video at all, and that mp3s can't be played during slide show. There is no battery, so it must always be plugged it, or you lose your previous settings (meaning you have to go through the poor menus to go back to 16x9). Other than that, I'm not as dissapointed as I thought I'd be.

I was happy with the frame out of the box. It had acceptable picture quality for the price and I felt it was a good value. But product degraded over the first 100 days. Week 5 a single green line appeared on the right side of the screen, at day 60, 3 more appeared. An email and phone message call to Support recieved no reply (would only accept message no chance to talk to a human). Day 101 the entire right third of the frame died. I have call 3 more times and left 3 more message over the last month without response. My recommendation is to spend a little more money and purchase from an extablished name. I cannot recommend this product of manufacturer. One addtional note, the website I purchase it from said it had a 1 year warrenty. Inside the box was a note which stated the warrenty period had been reduced to 90 days. Not a good indication of quality. I should have realized a possible issue at the beginning.

I set up my dad's computer with a screensaver slide show of all the pictures on his computer, and he often comments on how much he enjoys it. So when I saw this frame for a good price I read the reviews and decided to go for it.

The product looked good out of the box and I spent a bit of time test-loading 10 or so pictures onto an SD card to see how they looked on the screen, especially after following the resizing and cropping instructions posted in the other Amazon reviews. Very satisfied with the results, and comfortable with the procedure, I proceeded to resize and crop nearly 800 pictures to load onto a 1GB SD card - what a chore! The resizing took less than a minute - cropping the pictures took me forever.

Anyway, then I had problems. First I tried to load all the pictures onto the root drive of the SD card - no dice. Not a problem of the card or frame, but I'd forgotten I needed to reformat the card to FAT32 vs. FAT file structure before a root directory limitation could be overcome. I then loaded all the pictures onto the root directory of the reformatted card, and tried it out - no dice (just said 'loading...'). I then moved all the pictures to a subdirectory - still no good, with the same 'loading' message coming up, even after waiting 10 minutes or so.

My problem was pretty much solved when I found a Compact Flash card and put all the pictures on that - this time the frame read the pictures fine, and all is well, for the most part (see below). I'm therefore under the impression, both from my experience and a couple other reviews I read, that an SD card is not the preferred way to go with this frame, at least in my experience.

One other less critical problem has yet to be resolved. My dad, who likes the frame, wanted to be able to just pull an SD card out of his camera after taking a few pictures and see them displayed (with the black bars). He tried it with his Kodak camera, and the few pictures failed to load - the screen just goes black (not even 'loading...'). I pulled an SD card of my Canon camera, and it worked fine. Not sure if this is related to my other problems with SD cards, or if it has to do with the way the camera formats the card and directory structure, but I'm disappointed my dad can't do what he wanted to.

By the way, if anyone has any insight into my somewhat minor problems, comments would sure be appreciated!

Resize images to 620x342 and then shrink the width by 77%.
Change the ratio to 16:9 in the frame.
The image fits the frame perfectly.

Use high resolution with same ratio as 620x342 and picture looks really good.
I am using the random transition, the picture quality, transition... everything looks great.

Its a great product in this price range.

I am using Xnview and generated a script to crop and resize, so no hassle to shrink images one by one. All I need to do now is select the images and run the script.