Customer Reviews

Philips 6.5-Inch Digital Photo Frame (Clear & Black)

5 star:		(46)
4 star:		(36)
3 star:		(13)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I am very pleased with this item (although I will agree that Amazon needs to check some of its technical information for accuracy). I purchased this item as a Christmas gift for my grandparents, so it needs to be easy to use. I opened it to put on some family photos prior to sending it to them, and it was literally plug and play. You plug the ac adaptor into the wall. You plug the USB cable into the computer. Wait for it to be recognized, and then delete the demo photos and drag and drop your own photos into the frames photo folder. Unplug the USB cord and hit play. Beautiful. Plus the resolution on this item is much much better than a lot of alternatives out there. The pictures show up clear and beautiful. The frame itself is also very nice looking. It took me a few minutes how to figure out how to not have the clock displayed during the photo slideshow, but even that wasn't too hard. I'm considering buying another one as a gift for someone else, and perhaps even one for myself.

This product is nice, but be careful. In the "See more technical details" section, Amazon says that it has a rechargeable battery. It does not! You even have to reset the clock and some other settings when you unplug the unit.

Also, on some of the other Phillips frames (that do have a battery), Amazon is advertising 8 hours on the battery. Totally untrue; if you check the Phillips Web site, it's 0.8 hours.

This product was really easy to use. I had it out of the box, set up and loaded with pictures within 10 minutes. It was truly plug and play. The picture quality is good and the functions and menus are very intuitive. Getting through the detailed menus was a little trickier (changing the clock set up), but over all, I think this is a fabulous product.

This product was nicely packaged and very easy to setup out of the box. Plug it in and with the supplied USB cable was recognized right away by my PC without any additional software. Using a 1GB SD memory card I was up and running in no time. Most users will probably want to disable the default clock-over-photo display, as it hogs up a considerable part of the lower right-hand screen. The display and pixel quality in my opinion are VERY impressive, displaying in a 6x4 format and a 720x480 resolution. Sharp and bright, this frame displays photos just as one would expect from print quality. Menu navigation is acceptable although I didn't try any of the photo editing features choosing instead to edit on my computer. Larger file sizes take somewhat longer than the default slideshow time but never jerky and always sharp. Great product I'm happy.

Picture is terrific. Does a nice job compressing much larger photo files without artifacts. Menu is slightly hard to navigate, but not terrible. No battery or remote, but who really needs a remote anyway? Filled up a 2 Gig SD card with hundreds of pictures, and it worked like a charm. Frame looks good as well.

While I won't extol the virtues of the quality of the picture or the clarity of the controls and menuing, there were two disconcerting issues I had with this item.

While I understood that the display would only run on the AC adapter, I guess I presumed that there was some sort of battery backup for the time and date and other internal settings. In fact, there isn't - the device needs to be reset everytime the device loses power.

While even that wasn't a deal breaker in itself, I found the device's clock function only supported a 24 hour clock. That seemed an unnecessary and cumbersome design choice. I chose to return the product.

I did extensive research before buying this as a gift for my 90 year old mother. What appealed to me about this vs much less expensive frames was: easy operation, high resolution, and a built-in battery so you could unplug it and carry it around to share pictures.

The images really are beautiful. But the product no longer comes with a built-in battery (Amazon has removed the mention from its website since I purchased though it's still in Philips' own product sheet). And the interface, though simple (just a few buttons) is by no means intuitive. I'm used to technical things yet it took me quite a while to figure out how to navigate the many menus in order to do the simple task of loading in a few pictures and getting rid of the annoying default slide show effects (which are way too intrusive and distracting) and big clock in the corner of the screen.

Unfortunately, as soon as you unplug it the defaults return... it's obvious the software has not been updated since the battery was removed from the product specs. It's a beautiful disappointment and, were it not 2 days before Christmas as I'm discovering all of this, I'd return it for a more basic model and use the savings for a couple of memory cards.

Okay, so the picture looks good and the frame itself looks good. That said, this thing was near impossible to set up, and the manual and website offer NO help. The manual basically says, plug it into your computer. That's it. My husband and I are both tech-savvy and we've had a heck of a time with this. Things they don't tell you:
> The frame itself only has a couple MB of space. I had to use a memory card from an old camera to add memory. Unless you only want to show one picture, you're going to need a memory card.
> For some reason, though I dragged photos onto to the frame from my computer, the frame did not read them and kept telling me "no photo". It only recognized photos when I saved them to the memory card.
> The manual and frame itself are completely user-unfriendly; the operation icons are not self-explanatory, and not clearly explained in the manual. We had to figure out how to work it by trial and error: pressing buttons and seeing what happens.
> I've only been working with it for a couple of hours and it's already frozen once. Since this is a present for my folks, I'm really hoping this is not a sign of things to come.

All that said, it's working now and looks great. But if I had sent this to my parents without setting it up, they would never have been able to do this on their own.

I absolutely love this digital photo frame. Great resolution and color. My husband bought this for me for Christmas 2006. I set it up in our kitchen on the counter. About 3 weeks ago, the digital frame died. I freaked out. I called Amazon. They practically laughed and I'm sure the CS Rep that I was a crazy woman, so I called Phillips and they immediately sent me a replacement and a pre-paid shipping label for the dead frame. I couldn't believe they did this since I had the frame for 11 months! What great customer service.

This year I bought 3 of these frames for gifts.

Pros: Bright screen, clock, alarm clock, timed operation (set start/stop time), reads multiple card formats, USB port, allows you to rotate images from landscape to portrait orientation

Cons: Poorly designed 'kickstand' won't allow use in portrait orientation, no auto-rotation of portrait images, rotated images are centered & cropped, no support for multiple albums of photos, klunky user interface, only one each start & stop time, oversized 'wall-wart' plug, no internal battery, lightweight plastic has no friction or weight to keep it in place

Details on the cons:

The kickstand that lets the frame stand up is surprisingly heavy; apparently there's a lot of metal in there. That's a good thing. However, the way it mounts into the back of the frame is not. You push it in straight on at the 6 o'clock position and then twist slightly to the right. It would make more sense to push it in at an off angle and then turn it to the 6 o'clock position. And there's very little friction to hold it in place once it's in there, so a bump of the frame can knock it loose. If you think you might want to turn the frame from landscape to portrait -- which is shown in the product description on Amazon's page -- forget it. The kickstand falls right out when you do that. Guess the product description must use a photo of a different model frame. It also holds the frame nearly vertical; the photos look great if the frame is at eye level, but when sitting on a desktop, they appear a bit washed out.

The software allows you to rotate portrait images so they're not sideways in this landscape frame, but you have to do each image yourself. The software isn't sophisticated enough to recognize the orientation of an image and adjust it automatically. And after you rotate the image, it doesn't show up scaled so that the whole image fits the frame. The software cuts off the top and the bottom, leaving the middle of the image centered in the screen.

Want to have multiple photo albums on different subjects? You'll be limited to three, and you get that many only because there are 2 media slots in addition to the internal RAM. It's one 'album' per media source. You can have one set of pictures in the internal memory, another on a compact flash card, and a third on one of the other supported media formats. Want to see a different grouping? You'll need another media card, or you'll have to wipe one of your existing ones and put new photos on it. Having multiple 'albums' means spending some money or spending some time.

Navigating the rather primitive user interface with the top-mounted buttons gets very old very fast. Although it's nice that you can copy images directly from your media into the frame's internal memory, doing it is a pain as you slog slowly through the media's images, selecting the ones to move, and then moving them. I think I'll just assemble everything that I want on my Mac and then transfer them via the included USB cable.

Setting the options -- date, time, alarm, start/stop times, transitions, background color is equally klunky but you only have to do it once... until you unplug the frame and then all your settings are gone. I guess it was too much trouble to use nonvolatile RAM to store the date, time, and other settings.

Although it's nice to be able to operate the frame on a timer -- set a start time and a stop time -- it would have been nice to have more than one setting. Then you could have one setting for weekdays and another for weekends.

The power cord terminates in another one of the oversized wall-warts that takes up way too much space in a plug strip. This one goes sideways. I guess that's a good thing on a wall outlet, but not in a plug strip. Why not put the power supply inside and use a regular plug? And why does it cost $40-$60 more to get a frame with an internal battery? About that battery... I really wanted a frame that had a battery so that I wouldn't have to find a spot near an electrical outlet for regular use; I was thinking about mounting it on the wall above my desk at work. I took for granted that the customers who entered reviews a frame and the battery were actually talking about this frame. However, I should have realized that if the product description didn't mention a battery, then it didn't have one, despite the reviews. There appear to be add-on battery packs available... and they cost about the difference in price between this frame and it's $169 brother.

The plastic frame is extremely light in weight, and it's edges are very smooth. The kickstand comes to a point that is also smooth. Even a slight bump can shift this frame on a smooth surface like a desk; the weight of the cord can drag the frame off the edge if it's sitting very close when you bump it.

It's not worth the trouble it would take to send it back, so I guess I'll find a safe spot -- near an electrical outlet -- to put it, and I'll use it for awhile until it comes time to give someone a birthday/anniversary/holiday gift. If I do buy another one for myself, I'll do in a bricks & mortar store so I can try everything out first. Hmmmm... maybe I can glue this to the back of a wooden frame from the arts & crafts store and attach that frame's stand...