Smartparts SPDPF84M 8-Inch Digital Picture Frame (Wood)

by Smart Parts

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 2 x 11 x 9 inches ; 2.2 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B000MRLMTE
• Item model number: SPDPF84M
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: February 27, 2007

Product Description

Classic wood styling and a tack-sharp LCD screen make this digital picture frame a perfect complement to any room. Whether displaying pictures from its internal memory or one of the many types of supported memory cards, the SPDPF84M is a snap to operate. The included OptiPix¿ computer software lets you optimize and transfer up to 2,000 of your favorite pictures to the frame with just a few mouse clicks.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not bad if you get it on sale, January 9, 2008

By 

Randolph Steer (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Smartparts SPDPF84M 8-Inch Digital Picture Frame (Wood) (Electronics)

After reading reviews of dozens of frames, and looking at a dozen or two in stores, it's clear that there are no perfect ones and this type of device hasn't yet matured into a stable, easy-to-use product. This SmartParts 8.4" model (it just says 8" on the box) -- well, I wouldn't pay full price for it, but CC had it on sale at some locations for about $70 off. I gave it to my father for his birthday. He hadn't been able to view his old 35mm slide collection for some years, so I started scanning some of the slides from my childhood to put on the frame for him.

The main reasons I picked THIS frame from all the choices had nothing to do with technology. Since most frames don't have the brightness and contrast to make pictures really pop, I figured the photos would appear brighter and more saturated against a black surround (mat) -- most competing frames have white mats, which reduce the apparent brightness of the picture. And this one had a reasonably nice wood frame.

Picture: Not bad, but not as good as an LCD screen on a laptop (even after accounting for small size). The colors are not as saturated as they were on my LCD monitor at home, and it's not really bright -- fine in the evening or in a room without a lot of natural light, but in a bright living room in daylight it looked a bit washed out. The picture is very *smooth* -- they must be doing something to hide the individual pixels because I really couldn't see them -- but the cost is a bit of image softness. I had sharpened a lot of the images after resizing them to this frame's native resolution (800x600), and that sharpness was lost.

Interface and Usability: Really funky. I think this may be common to many brands of frames (I think they're all made by just a handful of companies in China) and may explain why many reviewers say they can't get various frames to do one thing or another. Maybe if the manufacturers would drop some of the silly features (like playing MP3 files - who wants to listen to music from a tinny-sounding picture frame when we've all got better music devices?) they could spend more time getting the fundamentals right.

Here's one example: There's no button to push for "Choose new media source" - you have to get to the main setup menu, which sometimes will appear when you turn the frame on (I think if there's nothing in the internal memory) or if you push the "Stop" button on the remote while a slide show is playing. So you hit buttons to go up-left-left-left... until you get to the icon to choose a memory source and you pick the internal memory. A list of files comes up. You press the button labeled "slideshow" and the frame says, "Can't find files." What does it mean - it just LISTED the files! If, however, you highlight the first picture in the list and hit the "select" button (which you might think would display that one picture), the slideshow starts playing!

You can vary the speed of the slide show, but not by much. It ranges from "as fast as it can retrieve each file", which is a pretty frantic pace, all the way down to ... 5 seconds per image - barely enough time to tell a visitor what it is, or even to recognize it if it's an old picture of someone or someplace you haven't seen in a while. The speeds are good for in-store demos, but in my living room I'd prefer to have it look like a static picture that I can study for a minute, except that when I look at it again a couple of minutes later, it's changed. The 5-second interval might also be a bit distracting if you had this on your desk and were trying to work. The emphasis seems to be on the *gimmick* of flashing pictures rather than on what people really like picture frames for.

The memory also acts kind of weird. The frame comes with 128 MB internal. When connected to a computer by a USB cable it looks in Windows like a typical removable flash-drive - that at least works as expected. Half of the 128MB is taken up by the software that comes with the frame - you can copy the installation file to your own PC and then delete it from the frame to free up the memory it takes. Besides the one big installation file of about 64 MB, there's a small executable file called "Death.exe"!! (Doo-doo doo-doo...) I'm not kidding! As you might guess, I haven't tried running that yet.

I copied the software files, deleted them from the frame's flash memory and was looking at a nice 130MB (decimal) of free space. My JPEG scans were 500-600K each, saved with maximum quality and minimum compression. I should have been able to fit well over 200 images into the internal memory, but I couldn't. I had actually only finished scanning, tweaking, and resizing 135 pictures. I tried copying them into the frame, and it stopped one short from the end - it only accepted 134 pictures. It still showed a lot of free memory -- 60+ MB I believe -- but wouldn't take any more.

Then when I went to the screen I mentioned earlier, where it lists all the files in its memory, it said that there were 110 pictures! So what happened to the other 24? I never figured that out. 110 pictures was enough to make my dad happy, and I figure there may be a whole new generation of frames available by Father's Day or certainly by next Christmas. That's one reason I said this is worthwhile at a discount. No point buying a big, expensive, feature-laden frame right now, because they will hopefully be getting a lot better for the money very soon. It gives him a reasonable collection of photos to look at for a while, then he can chuck it when I find a better one. I'll give that advice to anyone looking at any frame: buy one in the 8-10" diagonal size range now, if you can get it at a big discount. Then plan on replacing it in a year or so with something better.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great PIcture Viewer, August 4, 2007

By 

Skip Evans "Skip Evans" (Metro Houston) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Smartparts SPDPF84M 8-Inch Digital Picture Frame (Wood) (Electronics)

Bought this for my daughter's birthday. Loaded pictures from her entire lifetime and from other members of the family. We like it so much that we are planning to purchase one for ourselves.

The resolution on this frame is better than several others that we looked at. This is a key point if you are shopping for one of these frames.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Everyone needs one of these!, October 20, 2007

By 

Rhonda - See all my reviews

This review is from: Smartparts SPDPF84M 8-Inch Digital Picture Frame (Wood) (Electronics)

Our kids got their Dad one of these on his birthday for his office. He loves it! It is amazing! The picture quality is good and it is easy to use. What a great way to display lots of pictures. Just set it on "slideshow" and you can view hundreds of pics. A great xmas present too!

California Candlelady