Customer Reviews

Philips 7-Inch LCD Digital Photo Frame (Black)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(13)

 

 

The Philips 7-Inch LCD Digital Photo Frame (Black) hit enough of my key needs to be worth the cash for me. If you're like me, the thought of a $150 digital photo frame is simply over the top. The cost of these guys hasn't really come down too much in general. That was the main reason it took me so long to pull the trigger on one of these.

PROS
+ Great advanced menu functions allow you to control your slideshow
+ Very nice variety of slide-show transitions and collage options
+ Nice memory card slot allows you to connect up a variety of memory cards
+ Memory card slots for Compact Flash I (CF), SD Card, Multi Media Cards (MMC), MiniSD, Memory Stick (MS), and XD Picture Card
+ Convenient timer option turns frame on and off at the hours you select
+ A USB connector for easy viewing and sharing of photos stored on USB flash drive
+ USB connection to your computer (to manage the internal memory)
+ Play slideshows, single photo, thumbnails or show clock
+ Nice looking frame design
+ 7 inch screen is acceptable in size

CONS
- Pictures must be JPEG (.jpg) and work best when in native 16:9 widescreen format
- Competing alternatives from Sony natively support other image formats (RAW, TIFF, BMP)
- No video playback
- Lacks MP3 music playback for slideshows
- The list price is a bit much; the prevailing price is also on the high side
- You should only be looking to get this on sale
- Many newer alternatives coming to market which use less power than LCD
- Philips quality control has been declining the last few years
- Definitely test this within your return period to make sure you don't have a dud

DISPLAY FORMATS

The frame is listed at a display ratio of 16:9. This means it's natively widescreen, but it is still compatible with standard format cameras, including my Nikon and almost all handheld Canon models. Those with wide-format digital cameras are spared the extra step of reformatting.

Those with standard format digital cameras may want to look at one of the many standard format frames for full screen slide shows. Alternatively, this will show those standard sized photos fine if you make sure your frame is not set to "autofit." The autofit setting will stretch the pictures out to fit the frame, which is what you want to avoid for standard pictures. There are a number of options for borders to frame the extra space around your pictures.

SOFTWARE AND FEATURES

The included CD comes with a quick reference manual and Windows and Mac drivers. The CD also contains Windows compatible picture manager software. For a full PDF manual you will have to go to the website.

There's some kind of menu driven help manual on the CD as well.
But not all people will need a manual. The built-in menu is designed intuitively enough that you can find most settings by searching through it. Not all the settings are on the first screen, but with some searching you can find the buried settings to configure almost everything you need.

The optional clock display is another nice extra that makes this frame versatile. This doesn't totally make up for the lack of MP3 playback, but it's a nice feature.

The frame also has automatic orientation detection as an option, which rotates pictures from portrait to landscape. There are also collage and thumbnail view options.

This guy doesn't have the native image format support of some of the newer (and more expensive) frames from Sony. And I'm very nervous about Phillips spotty quality record of late. Mine has worked fine, but I've read too many complaints to not be concerned. Definitely put this through the paces before your return period expires. That way if you have any problems, you can get this guy replaced.

CONCLUSION

This unit is worth a look. This is a good product at a price I can accept for now. Hopefully this will come down over time.

This is at least a 3 star item, but the extra features bumps it just enough to hit 4 stars for me. Test it very well to make sure you don't have a dud.

Enjoy!

The picture quality is OK, nothing to write home about. I bought this model mainly because of the sentence from the product description here at Amazon that says it has three timers to turn it on and off. Not only does it only have one timer (no weekend timer like advertised) but that timer initially would not work. Turned out after much frustration that and time that the english version of the manual has a translation error. Rather than simply saying "turn on" or "turn off" the settings say "start dim" or "end dim." And the meaning of those prhases are opposite their normal meaning. The one timer included in the settings does work though, but I would have preferred separate weekday and weekend timers as advertised.

One thing everyone should know about all digital frames is that you should resize all your pictures to the frame's native resolution - this one is 480x234. I used a free photo editing software called faststone - and not only does resizing make your pics fit the frame, but it drastically reduces the size. I fit 4000 resized pics onto a 2GB SD card and it barely used 500 MB. Just be careful not to replace your full size images. Copy all your pics to another directory and then resize them. As far as this frame goes, I will keep it but I wouldn't recommend it. I think it is over-priced.

I've bought digital photo frames before - even ones from Philips. I got this one for my mom for Mother's Day, and it is a huge disappointment.
Here's why:
1. The screen is 16:9. It doesn't automatically "letterbox" 4:3 pictures though - instead, most of them come out looking skewed. You have to do a lot of manipulation of the pictures to make sure they "work" before you can load them to the frame.
2. You can't access the frame's internal memory through USB (at least not on Win XP). It doesn't show up. See, the frame acts as a reader for the two memory card slots. They show up, but the frame's internal memory doesn't. This means in order to load pictures, you have to copy them to a card, stick the card in, and then either leave the card in or use the menus to copy the pictures into the frame, which brings me to...
3. The menus don't have "bulk" options. You can't say "copy all of the pictures from the card to the internal memory" - it simply isn't an option. You also can't delete all pictures in one shot. Basically you can't do anything in one shot.
4. If that wasn't enough to make the internal memory completely useless, this settles it: There's a Philips ad with a baby's face in the internal memory that you simply cannot delete. When you try, it says "Operation fail!![sic]". I called their support line, and the person, while nice, was utterly unable to help me delete the picture. So, unless you like long tedious times copying pictures and an occasional Philips ad in your slideshow, you can't use the internal memory at all.
5. The display looks pixelated in a lot of pictures. Much moreso than other frames I've used.

If this hadn't been for Mother's Day and Mother's Day wasn't so close, I would be returning this immediately and getting something else. As is, I'll see how mom feels about it. It's definitely the last Philips frame I'll buy.

Phillips had really good photo frames before with high resolution screens. I bought this one because I presumed it would be the same, high quality. Totally wrong.

The resolution is so low that most of the images look pixelated and unbearable to look at.

As others have said, the "Baby" on the internal memory cannot be deleted and so makes the internal memory useless (unless you want to constantly see the Philips ad and a baby .......).

The "USB" connectivity only works with memory cards.. not the internal memory, so to use this (with the baby of course) you have to copy each and every picture one by one from the memory card.... Waste of time!

Setting the "dim" timer needs a lot of patience to set up as "dim-start" means the opposite of what you would think (ie it actually switched on the display rather than starting the dimming process....

Last but not least, the screen is not positioned properly leaving a gap of about 3 pixels at the Top/Left hand side (depending on if you have it vertical or horizontally placed) between the screen and the frame.

Summary: avoid this frame unless you want sore eyes and questions from friends about a baby that's not yours.......

Update - I really did want to view my digital pics and so took the plunge to get the "upmarket" version of this unit - the 8" one (8FF3FP) with 800 x 600 pixels. In this world you get what you pay for.... well so I thought. And paying twice the price should get twice the quality, right?

This new unit worked great ... for a few hours after which the "auto-fit" function stopped working and it put nasty rainbow coloured borders around the pictures instead of fitting pictures to suit the position of the frame (landscape/portrait). Even worse, ALL the portrait orientation pictures were distorted and looked extremely pixelated.

What a waste of my weekend.... It always seems the same these days. When a new technical thing comes out there are always bugs... then down the road they fix them with a "firmware upgrade".

So again - my advice is to totally avoid this range of photo frames!

I am very pleased with this digital frame. I think that Philips made it very easy to navigate with the different menus and settings. I did get stuck a couple of times. However, once I looked-up my little "snags" in the manual (from the enclosed CD) I was able to remedy my problems. For example I couldn't figure out how to set-up the automatic timer. After looking it up, I learned that instead of saying "turn on/off" it said "start/end dim." I think it's a strange way to phrase the feature but non-the-less it did the job.

I was frustrated when I tried to download pictures from my computer to the frame's internal memory. After fiddling around for a bit, I discovered that you can't download pictures from the computer directly to the frame. Instead, the frame acts more like a memory card reader and the pictures from the computer will be downloaded to the memory card inserted in the frame. After I put the pictures onto my memory card, I was able to go in and transfer the photos from my memory card to the internal memory. I would have liked to be able to download directly without the memory card but the extra step doesn't take that much extra time. Though I rarely use the internal memory. I'd rather display pictures from my memory cards and thumb drive because they store more pictures and usually those pictures are more recent than the pictures on the internal memory. And that way I don't have to display the lame baby picture (the one everyone else has mentioned).

Overall, I give the frame an A. I like the feature (I think it's called radiant color) that bleeds the colors of a picture to the edge of the frame on pictures that don't fit the wide screen size. Most frames have black bars on the edges for pictures that are too small. I am also very pleased with the color and quality of the pictures when they are being displayed. And I love the piano black polished finish - I think it is very sleek and classy.

This was my first experience w/a digital picture frame, and I thought to myself, it should be easier than this. I just wanted to put a couple pics on this for my Mom as a mothers day gift. I didn't want to leave a memory card in the thing the whole time so I decided to use the onboard memory. Well, there is no way to write to this memory using the USB cable. I thought this would be a common feature to include, but anyways, I ended up transferring photos from a USB thumb drive to the photo frame. That worked alright, but as mentioned by someone earlier, Phillips included a picture of a baby on the internal memory that cannot be deleted. I happened to have an old SD card left over from a previous digital camera, moved the pics to that, popped that in the photo frame and mission accomplished. There is no easy way to delete(or transfer)multiple photos from the frame itself. Only one at a time. And you have to confirm TWICE before it deletes anything. I would think a digital photo frame would have some of the basic features that most digital cameras include (they are around the same price) but I guess you get what you pay for.

Overall this is one of the best values out there. Here's what I liked about it:

- Looks elegant and the frame is not too wide like some other products.
- One of the lowest cost brand name photo frames
- Good variety of transitions (or use none if you want)
- Good variety of time choices to display photos (I prefer one minute)
- Several types of memory accepted
- Has built in auto on/off time, optionally works as an alarm clock, and if desired you can display the time with your photos.
- Uses very little power

What I didn't like:
- The picture looked about as good as any other brand but the quality doesn't compare to prints in frames in terms of color or sharpness. I think over time these digital photo frames will improve.
- The image is too cool and too high in contrast for my liking. I lowered the brightness of the frame in the setup menu. I also made a copy of my images in the computer, and added magenta and red and lowered the contrast and resized them down to 234 pixels high using a photo editing program. That really improved the look and lets me put thousands of photos on one memory card.
- My digital cameras don't shoot 16x9 format so the image doesn't fill the frame unless you set the option to fill the frame (stretch). I prefer images that are not stretched. It's better to make a 16x9 crop using a photo editing program or just be content that the image may not fill the full width of the picture frame. You have the option to display various colors (including black) to take up the unused space in the frame
- It's awkward to have the control buttons on the back but since I don't plan to mess with it that often it looks better than to have them on the front.
- I wish it displayed the date using various date options instead of just the Asian standard (day-month-year using only numbers)

Overall I'd recommend this item and think it is a good value. If you want to actively show slideshows to people and want to go through various folders of pictures etc. then you might look at the frames that have remote control instead.

Not a lot to add to Mark's review. Overall I like the frame. I picked it up in a Goldbox special.

Pros:
- Clear Picture
- Nice color
- "Radiant Color" is nice for normal ratio pictures and preferable to "black bars" or distorting by stretching.
- Dim Timer is nice option to turn off at night.
- Integrated reader for variety of media

Cons:
- Wide screen - I don't know about anyone else but very few of my pictures are widescreen.
- Hard to find some "features". For example setting the frame to not stretch non-widescreen photos is off of the "setup/background" option. Not very intuitive.

If you are looking for a simple digital phone frame and this is on sale, then definitely consider. However, I'd buy an extra memory card with it if you don't have one, so that you can leave it in.

I cant believe what a piece of junk this thing is. It has less memory than a casio calculator watch from 1984, it wont connect to my pc, it wont let me delete this stupid stock picture of a freakin baby that I absolutely LOATHE now. I want nothing more in life than to delete this wide-eyed idiot demon child from my picture frame. Every other dumb stock phillips photo I could delete, but this baby haunts my dreams.

Do yourself a favor and stay the heck away from this worthless piece of junk digital frame. I thought Phillips was a good, quality brand but apparently not. The buttons feel plasticy and cheap and are very unresponsive. DO NOT BUY THIS!!

The pictures on this product can be displayed from a number of sources including USB, two card readers and internal memory. When I first took this product out of the box I attempted to delete all the pictures in internal memory. However, there was one default picture which I could not delete. I called Philips tech support to ask if this was normal behavior.

I explained very clearly that I was attempting to delete the default pictures from internal memory. I was then instructed to go to my computer and asked which drives were displayed in my computer. I explained there were two drives (which I knew to be the card readers) and was then instructed to click on these drives. I told the Philips rep that the result of this action was for windows to state that there was no disk inserted into the drives (obviously since I had no cards in the card readers. I was then told by the Philips rep to format the drives (I was never asked if I had anything of value on these drives).The rep seemed baffled that I was unable to interact with the drives. I then reiterated to the Philips rep that I did not have any cards inserted in the readers and asked if the he was sure that the internal memory would show as a drive on my computer. The Philips rep was certain that it the internal memory should show as a drive on the computer and then proceeded to give me an RMA number to return the product.

When I inquired, I was told that the cost of the return shipping would be my responsibility. When I said that this did not make sense the rep was apologetic, but told me that he could not change that policy. I then went on to Amazon and was able to return the product at cost to Amazon. When the replacement arrived it exhibited the same behavior. I then determined that this was by design and simply added a CF card to display the pictures.

You can engineer a great product, but that product will only really be as good as the support. Philips has definitely failed here as they cannot even diagnose the designed behavior of their own product. This all would have been easier if Philips had bothered to give the tech support rep even an hour of training on the product line.

Bottom line is that Philips was unable to provide even basic support for their product and then expected me to return a perfectly good product at my cost. I would seriously consider not buying another product from Philips because of this and my rating of this product is greatly depreciated as a result.