Customer Reviews

Smartparts SPDPF84M 8-Inch Digital Picture Frame (Wood)

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

 

 

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.

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.

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

Looking at the previous reviews, this is only a picture frame and not a super computer. This product performs just fine, but you may need to resized large images. You cannot load this frame up with 1000 5mb photographs and expect it to act smooth like a desktop. Similarly for the MP3's you cannot load 1000 songs that are all done in HQ 360kbps...once again, it's a picture frame, not a desktop PC.

If you have all HQ images I suggest editing them to a lower mb in Windows Picture Manager and burning mp3's at a lesser bit rate. The difference is not noticeable (considering this is not audiophile equipment) and performance of the frame will be much smoother. I have no problems with mine.

Smartparts crams a lot of features into a budget photo frame.

The pluses:

Decent picture quality
Lots of features

The minuses:

The firmware running this picture frame is buggy as all get out. Your 60-second interval slideshow will magically become a 3-second interval slide show. Your mp3's will quit playing in the middle of your slide show. Navigating enough times between the main screen and your slideshow will eventually crash the OS.

The picture is BRIGHT, with no manual or digital brightness adjustment. So bright is this frame, that in certain lighting conditions (such as a dimly lit room), photographs with high contrast will appear washed out. Anal photographers might find themselves editing their photos, adjusting the brightness to compensate.

The mp3's play LOUD. The digital volume adjustment jumps from mute to enough decibels to hear from 8 feet away. And it just gets louder from there. The speaker distortion on high pitches and deep bass is apparent even from the lowest volume possible. Don't plan on going to bed with this picture frame gently lulling you to sleep.

Does not play well with high-capacity SD cards, either for lack of slow indexing software or just plain incompatibility.

The frame contained a file called Death.exe when accessed from my computer. Fortunately my virus scan detected and removed it. It was labeled Emerleox.worm by McAfee virus scan.

This frame was the absolute best frame I could find! Price was no object
and it was a great deal! Everyone that sees this frame is jealous. Digital frames became very popular and this one blows them all away!

I bought this for my Mother-in-law's 70th Birthday so I only have to load images once (I hope)...which is a good thing!

Picture quality is nice, and the wooden frame is much more traditional than others I've seen.

It took a while to figure out how to work it with my MAC...and after that, it was still cumbersome to load images. It kept creating smaller duplicates of all images loaded. I was able to delete them, but the instruction manual doesn't match the buttons on the remote control, so that took another half hour to figure out.

If you have a PC it's probably easier to use, and it's nice quality for the money.

Eventually I figured out how to load jpg's which is all I wanted to load. The quality of the pictures on the screen are excellent. BUT, after I loaded it I wrapped it as a present and it was opened 4 days later. Guess what ? it wouldn't turn on, the remote didn't work but after many, many trying to turn it on, plugging and unplugging, it finally came on. The remote never worked and after about 4 1/2 months neither did the frame. We fiddled with the off/on switch, plugging and unplugging and finally gave up.

Now we're a bit nervous about getting a new frame from any company since this one was a BAD experience. Don't buy this model.

I've owned this three years now and I wish I had purchased a different brand. I had problems with the software from day one. Nothing worked the way it was supposed to and it was very difficult to get pictures loaded to the memory of the picture frame and then to edit the list of pictures once they were there. The manual was useless and their web site did not provide any support info. I figured out a way to get it work but it was cumbersome and time consuming to add/change pictures. After several months of putting up with this software, I finally gave up and used an external drive to store the pictures. This worked fine for two years.

Whether using the unit's memory or my external drive, the slide show itself worked well and the picture display was of good quality. In addition, the frame had a nice look to it and, so, for a while, I was relatively happy with this unit.

Then, in year three, without any warning, the entire unit just died. It now won't turn on at all, no matter what I do. I searched the internet and found loads of other people with the same problem. Again, the company's web site offers no support information or help at all. I would call the support number but, being well past the warranty, I know where that conversation will go and it isn't worth it for a unit I didn't like much in the first place. I am going to shop for a better unit and a better manufacturer and I would advise you to do the same.