Customer Reviews

Panimage PI8004W01 8-Inch Digital Picture Frame (Black)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

This review is for the Pandigital PanImage 8" Digital Picture Frame Model Number PI8004W01. Purchased 1/19/2010.

First, I should share that I am very technically oriented and a perfectionist. I won't put up with a poor quality or pporly engineered product. Second, I just cannot for the life of me understand some of the comments in the negative reviews for this product based on my experience. I am not sure whether Pandigital has upgraded the product but maintained the same part number or what but there are some clear differences between those posts and my experience. The product I received does have a full 1GB memory and does display photos in a clear and crisp full 800 x 600 resolution. I was almost impressed with the playback of a video. In fact, out of curiosity the first thing I transferred was a 150mb video file that played perfectly sound and all.

Features I really like:

+ The ability to schedule the frame to turn on and off at predesignated times as I am giving this as a gift to my wife who will be putting it on her desk at the office.

+ The ability to select "auto convert" which converts the images being imported to the ideal image size for display (saves storage and saves time from having to do it myself manually on a PC).

+ 8" display as the 7" just seemed a little small to me.

+ 4:3 aspect ratio. I was actually planning to go with something that had 16:9 but then realized most cameras still use/produce 4:3 so this will display most images perfectly vs. having black bands on the right and left (like watching non-HDTV picture on an HDTV.

+ Connectivity - Supports most memory card sizes, USB cable connection to a PC, direct access to a USB drive, and more.

+ Sound - the ability to play a video and hear the sound or even background music if desired.

Last but not least, I was considering a Sony as an alternative but found that many user reviews are complaining about the inablity to load and play a photo that was edited by PC software. I retouch and/or edit photos using photoshop and other tools so I decided to avoid the Sony product.

I received the photo frame in a very timely manner and love it. The photos were very easy to upload and I love the fact that it holds 6400 pictures on it's memory, has a remote control, clock and can add music. The picture quality of the pictures are very good also. You have to plug this in an outlet, but for the price you can't beat it.

I agree with a previous reviewer that asked why this is getting such bad reviews. I, too, am pretty tech savvy and really didn't expect much from this item. It was a gift for my birthday from my mom, so who am I to argue with her about what is good and what isn't, right? So, I spent all of maybe a minute opening it, plugging it in, putting in my SD card, and watching it run. That's it. I had just come back from Hawaii and had pictures on the SD card she hadn't yet seen. We loved it. The picture quality is great, the ease of use is great. It comes with a little remote that magnetically attaches to the back of the frame; I expected the remote to respond much faster and then I read the manual (which is on a mini CD) and realized my mistake quickly, I wasn't using it correctly. After that, the remote actually responds exactly like it should. It has WIFI access (dongle available separately) to access your photo pages from the internet and has a neat calendar feature that you can program to run. While in calendar mode, it runs your pictures and a clock and you can program it to shut down at specific times. Or, of course, it can just run slideshow all day. There is also an option to pull up recipes...I haven't done that yet. It plays music and videos (certain formats only), and it can play music while you're running your slideshow!

Got this as a present for my wife. After doing extensive research I found this product to be a very good purchase. It has excellent picture resolution, lots of options, very easy to operate. Remote control is a plus. Arrived on time and in perfect packaging. I would highly recommend this it everyone!

Picture display on frame is just okay. I don't see it any better than other picture frames nor is it worse. It doesnt have the really crisp picture as I have expected but maybe my expectation is too high. The frame seem slow to response to the remote control and sometimes I have to push the remote control's button twice to make sure the picture frame picks up the signal even though I am a foot away from the picture frame.

What I don't like about it is that I had my photos arranged in a certain order to display our vacation trip but when the photos were copied to a Windows folder,then transfered to an SD card and onto the picture frame, my photos plays out of sequence. It is very annoying trying to share your vacation story and the photo with family but to find that the time sequence of the picturesis all mixed up. Panadigital tech support solution is that each picture have to be copied one by one and not in a group to the SD card. It gets tiresome to copy 600 pictures one by one. I'm usually tire and if I have to copy each picture one by one, I'll be asleep before picture number 50 gets copied to the SD card. Picture number 600 will definitely not be copied. Maybe it is not a Panadigital problem but it would be nice if they have a simple software to use to make picture viewing to a nicer experience. Right now, I find the product pretty much useless..

My box has this model number on it, but the frame has 1 GB internal memory and stores up to 6400 images. That said, this is a nice looking frame and the pictures look great. You can adjust the brightness of the pictures. You can rotate pictures but many of them may have the tops of heads cut off. The remote is not very responsive unless you lay it on a table in front of the frame. Otherwise, you have to press the buttons several times. You can put pictures in subfolders that are prelabeled and unchangeable, such as vacation, family, etc. and set just one folder to slideshow. What I wish this frame would do is allow you to display just one photo instead of the slideshow. An alternative is to put one picture in a subfolder, select it, and turn off transition, but you have to delete the picture from that subfolder and add another if you want to change the picture you want to display. Or you can put a few pictures in a subfolder and select the 1 hour or 24 hour interval, but that interval would apply to all your pictures, not just the subfolder, and you have to change the timing (and transition options if you like those) to show all your pictures again unless you like the 1 or 24 hour rotation for all of them. Not as convenient a choice as just being able to freeze one picture. It also does not let you save pictures to the internal memory from your card while playing the slideshow. I have a 10.4 inch Philips that allows you to do those things (but it doesn't rotate the pictures unless you rotate the frame). I like it better, it's just unfortunately too big for my needs. I don't know if I'll keep this Panimage. I like to display just one picture at times, and this frame does not offer a convenient way of doing so.

I made the mistake of going to the Pandigital site and downloading the manual before I bought this. According to the manual, if you purchase the optional wifi adapter the frame supports RSS feeds.

The frame requires a service called FrameIT (a Microsoft product) to display RSS feeds. The FrameIT service was discontinued in December 2010.

I contacted Pandigital. The very friendly call agent had no idea what RSS was and had never heard of FrameIT. He promised to call back after talking to a technical person, but I realized later that he never asked for my phone number. When I sent in a help request via email the response was to "Google Picasa or Snapfish", neither of which is supported by the frame's firmware for RSS.

Pandigital is misleading customers and their support team is not familiar with the products they are supposedly supporting.

This frame could be OK if Pandigital would issue a firmware update but there aren't any available on their site and it's been a long time since this frame was released. I highly doubt they will every improve it. The processor in the frame is either very underpowered, or the software is badly written. I suspect it is the latter since the menu system is very poor and the wireless features are flawed.

This is yet another frame that

a) Does not allow you to organize your photographs easily into folders
b) Is incompatible with most video formats
c) Won't play many simple JPEG images

Aside from that, the transitions between photos are jerky. There's no pan / scan. It does not do a nice fade to back option.

It is cheap and I did consider keeping it as it was intended as a Christmas present, but after battling with the very slow and unresponsive remote control I decided it would not be a nice present to 'inflict' upon anyone!

Sending it back and looking for something else. This is about the 6th frame I've tried and I seriously do not recommend it.

I also bought the wireless adapter for this, and although I was able to set it up OK, the software is again fundamentally flawed. You can access public photo sites without logging in and leaving the password in clear-text on the frame. Also - it does not automatically update when the remote content updates. I.e., I can't set it up once, then it to grandma and have control remotely over what is displayed.

My advice, Look elsewhere...

Mine does not have the clean, sleek look of the item pictured. It has a more traditional frame, which is not exactly my taste...but still nice. It'a a very good product all around, but I suspect there have been some updates since this one was manufactured. It would not accept the videos from my digital cameras, with one exception. Of course I'm happy that it will play any videos, but I did have certain files I really wanted to display and install. It's not terribly user-friendly, but then I'm not terribly tech-wise; I got it all figured out eventually, with help from the manual (except the video part). I am also pleased that it has more internal memory capacity than most digital frames in its price range. For what I paid I really can't complain (but obviously I did anyway)!

1) Locks up on some JPG images. These are standard images from a digital camera. Seemingly random which ones don't work.

2) Display seems a bit washed out compared to the PanDigital 7" model that I bought last year.

3) Can't set the date and time w/o the remote. Come on, I can set everything on my watch w/ 3 buttons. How come this won't let me set it using the 5 buttons.

Otherwise, does what you would expect and quite inexpensive.