Customer Reviews

Pandigital 7-Inch Digital Photo Frame with 2 Interchangeable Frames

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(45)

 

 

This is the first digital frame I bought. I know the resolution won't be anywhere close to a computer LCD monitor, but I was still very disappointed when I turned on the frame. The LCD screen is strangely long and narrow (resolution 1440x234), so a normal photo only occupies a small part of the screen, making this product effectively a 4" frame with a lot of black space on both sides. The resolution of the photos is very bad, and photos look a little distorted as well.

Pros:
1) Plug and Play, easy to set up.
2) Exchangeable frames included.

Cons:
1) Very poor resolution.
2) Strange LCD shape. Advertised as a 7", but effectively a 4-5" frame with a lot of unused LCD pixels.

I returned this product and bought a Westinghouse DPF0561 5.6" Frame instead. I like the Westinghouse a lot more. It is even easier to set up, photos look good and actually larger than on the Pandigital 7" frame, and viewing angle is great.

The good: great price! nice and bright, very easy to use (I barely had to look at the manual.) Pretty much plug and play. (I have a 2-year old Dell PC, Windows XP Professional.) Overall, very satisfactory product. I had no issue about resolution: my photos look fine, just like my flat screen LCD monitor. No issues with direction of view, you can see the photos fine from almost any angle. No trouble with the remote (though it IS tiny.) Loading the photos was a breeze -- just like using a USB memory stick.

The Caveats: really only: the screen aspect ratio is very wide and short -- about the same as a wide-screen movie format (the picture shown on Amazon is a bit deceptive because of the white space around the figures -- it's very wide and short.) Most vertically oriented photos won't work very well. (My guess is they saved money by re-using an existing screen part that was designed for small DVD players.) I did end up re-cropping all the photos before I put them into the frame (after a brief trial run with the original formats.) After re-cropping, I pretty well got what I expected. The frame does not automatically size the photo to fit the frame, like Internet Explorer does and you are likely used to seeing on your computer. I recommend resizing the photos down to where the long (horizontal) dimension number of pixels is about 900, and cropping the vertical axis to make the shape match the frame. Sounds complicated; but I did this with 110 photos in less than an hour.

The Bottom Line: I bought this for my wife and she is thrilled and is enjoying "showing it off" to her co-workers with about 110 family photos on it. It is running at 5-second rate and it takes around 10 minutes to cycle through. We are satisfied with it -- for the price.

Having recently built a digital picture frame from scratch, I was excited when someone gave us this frame for xmas, to see what a commercial frame would be like. After using it for a few weeks, I have to say that if it wasn't a present I would return it and get one that was built by people who had some sense of innovation.

The Good:
* Screen is bright, images look great
* Resolution is only 640x480 but it will play images up to 10 megapixel and they look pretty good to me. Doesn't seem like you need much higher resolution than that on such a small screen.
* Computer connection worked great - I plugged it into my xp box, all drivers installed automatically without the need for a cd and then 4 new removable drives showed up. It would be nice if only the drives with a card in them showed up but this is a minor issue.

The bad:
My main complaint about this picture frame is that the people who made it obviously had no interest in making the sort of product that you enjoy using because it is clear that the inventor appreciated why such a product would be fun to have or what makes it an improvement over what was there before. If I bought this frame in 1999 or if it cost $50, I could have forgiven it for the poor design, but in 2007, for $180, it is completely unacceptable. We live in the future here people, get with the program!

I have not used other frames on the market, but given that you can buy an old tablet pc with a 12" screen on ebay for $70, strap it into a cheap frame and make your own, pc-based screen that works 100 times better than this frame, just by running a screen saver for under $150, I'd say this frame is not worth the money at all. This screen just doesn't deliver the goods for the price.

Some details:
* Menu system is insanely poorly designed - for instance, you have to be in a specific menu to adjust the system settings - pushing the "setup" button at any other time does nothing despite the fact the the setting are global
* Remote control only works when you are standing about a foot from the computer and pointing it directly at the tiny IR hole in the front of the screen.
* Screen only works as a horizontal frame - there is no way set it up as a vertical frame (i.e. as a 480x640 frame) because the frame automatically rotates vertical images and there is no way to turn this "feature" off.
* The slowest slideshow speed setting is 1 minute between images. Your only other option is to have it just be on 1 image that doesn't change.
* No way to connect remotely to the computer or to easily
get images onto the frame without having to take the frame to where your computer is or go through a tedious process with a memory card an the crappy menu system.
* Good viewings angles are limited but this is a general problem with lcd screens

We loaded up some photos and they looked blocky and bad. Immediately returned them. These were photos taken on a Digital Rebel and look great on the computer and in print.

Just bought this photo frame over the weekend. I sat down and downloaded a bunch of photos off my computer onto this frame. It works great. I haven't tried the MP3 music part of it or hooking it up to the TV, but as a digital photo frame...it is worth the money. The cheapest price I have seen it was on sale at Kohls for $99.99 on Power Hour sale.

I bought this as a gift for my mother and it proved not only to be of fairly poor quality but also very frustrating to use. The issues are as follows:
- The screen is low resolution (480 x 234) and a wider aspect ratio than standard digital cameras. The frame crops pictures to fit, which means peoples heads are often cut off.
- The instructions are very poorly written.
- Copying files from a memory card to the internal memory is a very painful process in which the file must be selected using the remote control, then you must go through a long menu of items to get to 'copy file', after this an 'are you sure?' dialog comes up before the file is actually copied. One reviewer says there is a 'copy all' option while another reviewer says there is no such option. I was not able to find this option in the instructions or using the system. If the option exists it is obscure and not documented at least on the model we got.
- We tried to option of copying files to the internal memory from 2 different computers. On an Intel based Macintosh computer we never got it to appear at all. Using a Dell running Windows after a few tries and rebooting we could get it to appear as an external drive but were never able to successfully copy any files.
- The whole thing appears to be constructed of the very cheapest plastic available

My mother bought this item for herself and asked me to load pictures of the family on it for her. Transferring the photos from the card is simple enough - just plug it in, choose the card, press setup and then choose the copy option. Within that dialogue box, there is an option to copy all. The quality of the images, however, leaves much to be desired. The promo shot that is shown for this item is very misleading. The photos are grainy and dark, even at the highest brightness setting. I also could not get it to play videos at all. The frame just simply froze until I turned it off and back on again. Lastly, it seemed that photos kept "disappearing" after being loaded onto the frame. After two days of carefully selecting photos from my computer and transferring them to the frame, there were only a couple of dozen on the internal memory the next time I turned it on.

I haven't used any other digital frames because I've always thought they were a ridiculous waste of money, so I have nothing to compare this frame against...but I have to say that I'm glad I didn't buy one! I'll be happy to stick with old fashioned picture frames or an album. Besides, if I really want to see a slideshow of high quality digital images, I'll just turn on my screensaver!

I bought this on sale for $80; it works great, has lots of options, pictures,movies and music. The music can play as it displays the pictures. I found it somewhat restricting in video display but didn't really buy it for that reason. Very pleased with it.

great concept and overall good product, especially for the price. my 1st such frame and it is truly a good idea. Here's what i now know i would look for next time that is missing here and what i like:

good:
-remote is quite handy and you end up using it more then you think
-slideshow feature
-reads most all cards
-pretty easy menus
-looks good
-Read from card, download from card, download from computer

Bad (less good for me)
-resolution not the best
-longest time delay on slideshow is 30secs. Would like longer delays up to an hour
-remote is finicky
-doesn't seem to save changes made to a pic (like rotate) but i might not be doing correctly)

But for the price, great product.

At first when I received this product for Christmas, I was very excited because I have a lot of digital photos that would be nice to display. However there were a couple major problems with this picture frame:

1. The display was quite poor, but I guess that's what you get for $100
2. The video and sound was pretty much useless.
3. The reliability is very poor. After 3 weeks the frame started making a squeeling noise. We sent it back and then received another one that didn't even turn on. I sent that one back for a refund

It appears that there are better digital picture frames for just a little more money out there so I would pass on this one even though it isn't very expensive.