Customer Reviews

Royal PF80 Digital Frame

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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 !

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).

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.

This is my first digital picture frame, so I do not have anything to compare it against. I am generally very happy with this product - it is very easy to use, and I am happy with the resolution and the picture quality.

The only downside to this frame is that the instruction manual is not helpful at all, and as one other reviewer noted, I had to learn how to do things by trial and error. I also do not like that when you make changes to the layout - rotating or deleting images, it is not "saved" to the memory card and so you need to make the changes each time.

However, I like this product enough to buy more of these for the grandparents this next Christmas.

I opened this up, inserted the SD card with photos and realized that everything looked purple. All of the photos had distortion and a bright purple overtone and splotches. Not subtle either - it was a total mess. I tried changing the hue, brightness, contrast, etc. settings but nothing worked. I called Royal's customer service and spoke with someone who basically ignored everything I said and asked me questions that I had just answered for her five seconds earlier. Finally she told me that the unit was apparently defective and must be returned to the store.

Amazon has been great about it and is sending me a new unit, but it's still cutting it close just before Christmas (this is a gift). Very frustrating to receive a defective product.

Apart from this, the frame seems to be of average quality. The menus are not terribly user friendly but are adequate. It accepts many different types of cards, which is a plus.

I have no complaints over this product. The viewing range around the room is great. The clarity of the pictures is fine for 800 x 600 - after all, I wasn't looking for, nor needed perfection. Easy to set up. Personally, I don't care about the no sound as I wanted it for pictures, not movies. The 4:3 screen ratio is just what I wanted as many of my photos are old, squarish and are being scanned and would either be "stretched" on the "widescreen" models or would appear too small when it is "auto fitted" into the widecreen mode. Plenty of memory. I will be able to get hundred's of my photos up to view. The remote works fine. I read a review somewhere that complained that the frame did not save the settings when turned off. I'm not sure what was meant by this. My frame has kept the my custom picture contrast, etc... settings and slide show timing settings each time I turn it off and put in a new card. If it has any down side - that is that it does not have a random play of photo files mode, it just plays in the order on my memory card. But, for the price and quality, I am very happy with it!

this is my second frame. i loved it so much. i got the frst one like 2 yrs ago and still look like new thats why I purchased another one. now they are placed on both sides of my table. and my family would stare at them just like watching a movie.

I guess you get what you pay for, though a hundred bucks for a product that doesn't work right after a few months doesn't seem cheap. I bought this as a Christmas gift last November (2007). It worked OK for a couple of months, though the picture quality was never that great. Then we had to start hitting the 'reset' button to correct a distorted screen (a wavy screen, not just aspect distortion). Eventually the distortion led to half the screen missing, and the other half distorted, and the reset button no longer fixes the problem. It's over 90 days since purchase, so the store won't take it back, so I'm left with a piece of junk.