Customer Reviews

Pandigital Panimage PI8004W01B 8-Inch LED Digital Photo Frame (Black)

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

 

 

Like many others, I purchased this frame to upload photos as a Christmas gift (for my 84 year old mother-in-law). I've just uploaded about 200 photos and it is working so well. (I plan to add lots more pics, just wanted to see if and how it worked). This is the 2nd digital frame I purchased. The first was a Philips 8" frame from Walmart which froze on me while I uploaded pics (aurgh!!!!). Returned that and found this one on sale for $50 at KMart. I find the 8" screen a nice size, not too big or small. One big "must" for me was it had to be something that my MIL could easily work to get the slideshow started. This one seems like it will. I found the remote and the menu much easier to understand and work than the Philips frame.

I used a mini USB cable from my Canon camera to upload pictures from my computer to this frame. I found out you don't use the remote for that process, but it was easy enough. I just opened the H port file on my computer, had Facebook photos stored in my Picasa pictures, and exported them to the H port file. (a copy of each pic still stays in the Picasa folder). It went so quickly, which made me happy.

I like the random viewing option on the slideshow, and it has nice random transitions from photo to photo. I'm not too picky about picture quality, hey, these look fine to me. They will be perfect for my MIL who will love this gift. (Score one for me, finally! lol) I'm a little skittish about messing too much with this since I had a problem with the other frame I purchased. I just want your basic frame with slideshow with the above named options. Happy with the purchase.

I've had my Pandigital Panimage PI8004W01B 8-Inch LED Digital Photo Frame (Black) for a week now and so far I am very pleased. (I purchased it from OfficeMax for $49.99) Setup took me all of 5 minutes, if that long, to do. I found the remote easy to work with once I figured out how to use the keys. I can understand some of the frustration the other reviewers have had. I've owned other Digital Photo Frames and I may be old fashion when it comes to digital images, but the viewing aspect ratio 4:3, and the 800x600 resolution LCD panel is the way to go. Pictures are beautifully clear without them being "shrunk-to-fit" as with my last digital frame did (GiiNii 7" photo frame which cratered on me in less than a year which is the reason for this purchase)

The features I like most are:
* On-screen time display
* On-screen photo time stamp display
* Sleep function. I keep this frame at work so I set the sleep feature for 8 hours and about the time I get ready to leave from work it shuts down. Next morning, I press any key on the remote and it wakes back up.

As far as down loading pictures, I don't bother. SDHC Flash Memory Cards are so cheap these days, I keep all my pictures stored on them. I simply copy the ones I want from my computer's hard-drive on to the card, then slip it into the slot on the side of the frame and "Let the slideshow begin". That simple (However, I did have to set it to random). So if (or should I say when) your frame craters, you just pop it out and stick it in a new one.

I bought this frame to fill it with pictures for my mother-in-law of her first international trip to Japan. My digital picture frame model PI8004W01B has 512 of internal memory. After reading the descriptions here and for the PI8004W01 model I was a little nervous. You cannot organize the pictures on the device itself, but I think few, if any, frames let you do that. I have an old PowerBook G4 Mac with old iPhoto 6.06 software and I had combined photos from two different cameras, an iPhone, and some scanned pictures in an iPhoto album. Within the iPhoto software, I dragged photos around in the album to coordinate the different cameras so that it was all chronological. I cropped and rotated and adjusted brightness etc. I hooked up the powered-up PI8004201B to my Mac with a USB cable I have, the icon for the Pandigital appeared, I opened its photo folder, and in my iPhoto software I just hit "select all" and dragged the photos over to the pandigital photo folder, and they all saved within minutes. It maintained the same order and settings in the digital frame that I had on my Mac. I didn't have to rename the files. They all displayed, in the same order, with the same changes, no matter which of the four sources they had come from.

Works fine by me!

Only thing I wished was that the internal memory was bigger. I had to do a lot of deleting to shrink the collection down to 512 and couldn't include any video at all.

Next techie dream: I wish my iPhoto software had a way of creating a caption for each picture and that Pandigital had a "display caption" button on the remote and the housing so that a forgetful viewer could cue up the text for that photo and be reminded of date, place, event, names of people in the photo, etc.

I noticed after ordering that this is essentially the same product as PI8004W01 listed in Amazon. Same price with only difference being the "B" (that presumably stands for "Black") at the end of the model number. There is a difference in the description. The description here says that the product only has 256MB. The description of the PI8004W01 says it has 512MB. The description on the manufacturer's site says it has 1GB of memory. Therefore, I probably would not order the PI8004W01B but instead order the PI8004W01 and confirm from Amazon that it actually has 1G of internal memeory.

I bought this as a present and planned on loading photos for my mother before giving to her. I had lots of pictures stored on a flash drive and the instruction manual said this would work fine. I was able to figure out how to choose individual photos, checking them off as I scrolled through, but then couldn't figure out how to get them to save and once I moved to a new page all of the checked photos were unchecked and I had to start over again. The photos looked horrible. They were grainy, and blurry when I just had it do a slideshow from the flashdrive. This frame also has a VERY hard time standing up on its own. The stand in the back is too short and frame is too heavy so it continued to fall over backwards. It also shows fingerprints GALORE! I had a hard time getting the thing clean before returning it and I only handled it a few times. This was my first experience with a digital frame and it just doesn't seem worth it. I'll get a photo album.

I've just spent all evening loading photos into this lame photo frame. But I've decided it is going back to the seller tomorrow. I bought it b/o the 4:3 ratio screen, USB-PC connectivity and the remote. Basically, like a lot of hardware these days this thing is HALF-BAKED. Why the engineers can't actually complete a project when it comes to software and hardware is a modern mystery.

Problems:
1) There is option for a file system for the internal memory just a large basket of files so forget trying to group by themes unless you rename all the files to say friends or travel, etc.
2) No way I can see to pick the order of play it is either alphabetical or random.
3) About a dozen of my first 200 files would not pass muster with this poc machine, i.e. corrupted.
With some experimenting I found that resaving the files and unchecking the "progressive" option in my photo editor
would allow them to be displayed. This problem of non-display of perfectly good jpg files seems common in these DPFs and is a great example of the complete lack of common sense of today's breed of software engineers and why I say this toy is half-baked.
4) The remote will drive you mad. The buttons don't respond reliably. Also it doesn't allow one to jump down a long list of files nor can you scroll a list. You have to mindlessly click a "down" button over and over and over... I spent an hour searching for the "corrupt" files to delete them. More often than not, after each delete, on exiting the menu I was sent back up to the top of the long file list by this malevolent software! Can't imagine anyone managing hundreds of files.
5) No option to change the frame orientation! Strange too because the support arm on the back swivels for landscape or portrait mode! But you are stuck in landscape mode. The software automatically crops portrait pics in "optimal" mode but frequently does a bad job with cut off heads and no way to fix it short of manually cropping the original photo or by selecting "original" mode. What then is the point of the "optimal" mode?
6) Colors are not vibrant a bit muddy and no adjustment of the "LCD color" menu item would fix it.

I really wanted to like this photo frame. It has potential but it just isn't ready for prime time. It seriously needs a remote that works and allows one to maneuver in a long file list. It also needs a file system to allow some modicum of order. When will a manufacturer (other than Apple) understand that they could really clean up if only they would THINK before sending out this sort of junk?

I own a 15" Nix which I love. The only problem with the Nix is that it is picky about the display order (it displays picture not by name but by the time stamp they were copied onto the memory). Otherwise I love it and it has been performing as it should every day for months now.

I bought the 8" Pandigital at Costco as a present for my parents who are technology challenged. First, I tried to display the pictures from a USB stick. Finding the folder for the USB stick was a lot of trial and error. I couldn't find an option to adjust brightness, saturation, contrast, etc.

Which I could have lived with, but the deal breaker for me was that it doesn't recognize the folders on the stick. I have a lot of pictures and slideshows and run them off a 16gb USB stick on the Nix without a problem being able to pick different slideshows if I want to.

I decided to return it and get the Nix 8" Hu-Motion instead!

I won this at a raffle and was not expecting much from it, thinking someone had donated it out of dissatisfaction with it, but I was pleasantly surprised.

The built-in user interface can feel a bit clunky at times, but I had no problem simply inserting an SD card and having it install the photos to its internal memory. But I prefer to just hook the frame up to the Mac directly, open it has a folder, and drop photos onto it. Works great. I'm not sure why a few others were having problems with some of their photos, unless they were in RAW or something else odd. It took all the photos I threw at it.

If you have the tools to do it (like Lightroom), I'd recommend batch resizing your images and exporting them at 800 (longest side) resolution - that way the frame doesn't have to waste space or processing power resizing them. The version I have has about 175MB free space. I put on 500 resized photos which used about half that space. Other frames come with more memory, but if you use resized photos, this is probably plenty.

Picture quality ranges - not sure why - 80% of my photos look great, and the other 20% are a bit desaturated with a slight blue tint - this might just be my color profiles getting in the way. Resolution is decent and overall I'm impressed by the quality at this price. It even comes with a remote. I would not hesitate to recommend it.

Biggest problem: I'm now so distracted looking at my photos that it's hard to get any work done!

I had to find a digital frame that had it's own internal memory for the building I work in because we're not allowed to have removeable media (Flash cards) for security reasons. I had looked at several that were considerably more than the plug-in-a-card-and-go frames, until I found this one. I was originally skeptical, but couldn't beat the price.
It's clear, holds a ton of pics internally, was easy to set up, has a nice folder feature to seperate out pics for special occasions, plays videos and music, and lets you set up a personnal greeting screen. There was considerably more to this than just a digital frame. I was very happy with it and would definately recommend to friends and family.

I gave this as a gift to my parents for Christmas! It was a great price for the size frame and shipping was free! It is fairly easy to set up. I wish the photos would show in the order in which you upload them. It shuffles them around. That is my only complaint, but I'm sure my parents don't care. I will buy another one, one day for our home.