Royal PF80 Digital Frame

by Royal

Product Details

• Item Weight: 2.7 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B000FOKELQ
• Item model number: 39116S
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: November 26, 2006

Product Description

Simply remove the compatible media card containing pictures from your digital camera and slide it into the Royal digital picture frame. Now just sit back, relax, and enjoy the memories! It''s that easy just plug, play, and view.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

59 of 59 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great digital photo frame !, November 7, 2006

By 

J.G (TX USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Royal PF80 Digital Frame (Electronics)

I compared several digital photo frames before deciding on this one. I managed to get one of these off another website for $110, It was the best among the three that I have. I had the digital spectrum 5" photo frame which could play music and video and all but looks like a toy and the resolution was poor with limited viewing angles. The second one that I had was from Radio Shack - Optimus - it was 7" but the photo display was the same as the 5" as the 7" was horizontal not diagonal. (It's like the widescreen format but when you display a normal picture, it would only display black bars at the side. The Optimus has fantastic resolution and viewing angles but it does not accept CF cards and does not play videos. Finally, I settled on the Royal 8". For the price - I think it was the best in terms of value and function among the three.

The pros of Royal PF80 : (1) Accepts CF, SD, MMC, MS; (2) Plays avi video (minus sound), (3) fantastic resolution and viewing angles; (4) 8" diagonal screen is big enough to be seen across the room; (5) Comes with remote; (6) Removable silver frame but there was not extra bezel in the box

The cons : (1) No speakers and no sound output; (2) AC wire is a little short; (3) Setup is not fully plug and play. You need to select a few buttons before it would play, (4) The build is still plastic but at least it was painted like a photoframe and thus, does not look like a toy .

The quality is comparable to the Westinghouse 8" sold at Bestbuy but at half the price !

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good enough...for now (and the money), February 7, 2007

By 

txtxyeha (Austin, TX) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Royal PF80 Digital Frame (Electronics)

In an effort to de-clutter my office, I bought this online for less than $100. For the price I am pleased with this product. With that being said there are numerous areas needing improvement.

The setup was less painful than anticipated; however, the owner's manual was not that much help. You need to be ready to go through the trial-and-error process. With all that being said it took my less than 20" to have this up and running.

It read the pictures on my SD card w/o a problem. I had 11 pictures ready to go by doing the following before the frame arrived:

1) Resized the 4MB pix down to a 800 x 600 scale (about 50K in size) using Microsoft Office Picture Manager.
2) Changed the orientation of the 3 landscape pix to portrait using MS Paint (created artificial black borders).

The first problem I ran into was its default orientation is landscape, thus I had to rotate all the pictures with the remote one at a time during the slide show. Not that big of a deal, but I don't want to do that every morning when I turn on the unit and find that my pictures have been rotated back to landscape. Funny that my slideshow settings (e.g., advance every 10", use X transition) are saved when I power down, but the picture orientation reverts back to landscape. Therefore it's back to Picture Manager and Paint to make everything a landscape format. I'll also keep in the back of my mind not to rotate the camera when I'm taking pictures of the kids.

Second issue is the resolution isn't that great. This frame is replacing a "real" picture of the kids and there is a noticable difference in the resolution. I know, I know - it's not far to compare a real pix with this frame; however, don't expect the images of your pictures to have the kind of quality as the picture on the outside of the box this frame came in. With that being said I am standing less than 3' away from the frame therefore can see the difference. When I increase that distance to just 4' it's a little easier on the eyes. The color is definately eye-catching when you enter my office from 10+ feet away from the screen.

Final issue is reliability. Within the first hour of operation I have had to re-boot the device twice. In the three days I have had this, I have had to reboot this at sometime during the day. On the one hand it wasn't that big of a deal to power off/power on then pressing the four buttons required to get to the slideshow, but there is a nagging concern that six weeks from now a reboot will not solve a problem. This is what I expected at less than $100.

Very much looking forward to the day when I can get double the resolution and dictate what the default orientation is for the same $100. Until then this will do fine (if it holds out that long).

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Capable but Cumbersome..., December 1, 2007

By 

TG (Alpharetta, GA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Royal PF80 Digital Frame (Electronics)

PROs:
Excellent image quality for both pictures and videos. Scales large images to 800x600 very good.
Random Image viewing.
Extensive memory card options.
Quick and effortless slide show.
Very nice TFT adjustment capability: (Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, Hue, Sharpness).
During slide show if one presses the INFO button, it will display image stats and details on the screen for each pic.
During a video play, the INFO button alternates between time left to play, time played, and no time display options.

CONs:
No internal memory other than the inserted memory card.
Bad documentation.
No USB connection to PC. The USB connection on the unit is for attaching flash drives only.
Does not retain settings after poweroff and does not save them to preferences folder even though it displays the folder itself.
Slide show delay ranges from 1-10 secs only.
Video display very cumbersome unless in the right format and size to begin with.
No sound capability.
Remote works but buttons are very close together and forces one to press using fingertips or nails. Otherwise one hits the wrong keys by mistake.

COMMENTS:
While the image displays worked without any effort and slide shows were very easy to setup, the video displays were very cumbersome. I could not find a format that made the AVI files work. I tried 8 different codecs to encode the files and neither was recognized. I submitted a tech support question to Royal asking for the proper encoding for the AVI files. While the documentation says that it will display mpeg files, it does not work with regular mpeg (mpeg1 and mpeg2) files. The only mepg format I could make it display was MP4. In MP4 format it displayed 320x240, 480x272, and 480x320. I could get it to play a 45 minute video of 203MB size without a problem.
Overall it does what it is supposed to do - display images in high quality. All the quirks are workable. I would recommend the product highly.