Customer Reviews

Sony DPF-V900 9-Inch Digital Photo Frame

5 star:		(28)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

I looked at several brands of digital photo frames. Every time I came back to the Sony because it stands out for picture quality, sharpness, features (lots of features), ease of operation. Even if immediately you don't think you would use all of the features, pay the money and get it anyway. You'll be surprised how all of a sudden one or more of those features is a neat thing to have. The internal memory is large, slideshow, individual view, and picture selection from any source is so simple you can start using most of the features right out of the box. Even the owners manual is extremely user friendly. Yes the price was a bit much but put the Sony next to the others on the market and there is no comparison for picture quality. One downside: you have to use a power cord. I found a couple of portable power sources but power plug on the Sony is not the typical power recepticle found on most products. Thanks Sony....how about making a portable source available? I would love to place the frame on a table for display without having to find a place to plug it in. I found only one brand of frame with a built in battery but the picture quality was no where near the Sony so I opted for the Sony hoping that I could find a portable power pack or hope I will always have a place to plug it in. Price is starting to come down so be patient if price is your obstacle. It is well worth the wait.

...and I've owned four of them.

My requirements were pretty simple -- a high-quality LCD and the ability to play from a large selection of pictures, either randomly (my preference) or by shoot date (my wife's preference). I went through three frames that choked on large numbers of pictures, had washed-out displays, and/or couldn't play randomly or sequentially. I was surprised by how poorly conceived and tested these frames were. (Here's a prior rant on the Digital Foci IMT-081 Image Moments Digital Photo Frame.)

But the DPF-V900 is a fine frame. It has a clean design; has a sharp, bright LCD; and has no problem with my 4300 pictures (and is good for up to 10,000, according to the manual).

Bottom line is that, while not perfect, the DPF-V900 is a real product from a real company that has done some real quality control. As far as I can tell, that's the state of the art in the digital frame business right now.

First of all, the image quality is good. Now that we got that out of the way, I felt very compelled to write this review because as a few others have stated, this frame has compatibility issues with files that have been editted via photoshop, or even simple renaming files like infranview. all i actually did was just download files off of an online photo album (smugmug), and the files would load with question marks. Some have experienced the same, and as one reviewer said (Alex), he had to convert the files to BMP in order for them to show up. When loading photos, it takes a while for the files to transfer, or even recognize external media. The auto correct mode also does not work very well. I got this as a present for my grandparents, and luckily, they wont be tinkering with it much often. But for a photo person like myself, be careful of the hassle you'll experience with this frame. For a $200 frame, I expect more from Sony. Once again, for those who have bought this frame and experiencing the ? mark issue with file recognition, you need to convert the files to bmp in order for them to load correctly. I found a review on here that saved the day for me, so i hope this helps somebody else as well.

A DPF has been on our wishlist for a long time but we have been put off by the reviews, mostly critical. Sony has now come up with a pricey but solid, well built, attractive and intuitively programmed unit with an LCD screen that presents supurb images. It includes lots of image display and data presentation options to tinker with. It would be nice if it had a battery, if for no other reason than to facilitate loading it from the computer, since the corded transformer is clunky and so heavy that it can drag the unit off the table. Clock functions are counter-intuitive and poorly described in the manual. Sony says that the TIFF image file format is compatable but we found that not to be the case. So instead, we Photoshop-converted our Web GIF photos to BMP, which worked fine.
In all, DPF's have finally arrived with this Sony product. We're delighted with it.

There are a ton of cheaper digital picture frames from all sorts of companies I never heard of, but you can always count on Sony. Somewhat more expensive for it's size, but it works perfectly right out of the box. There are a few poor reviews here that claim pictures that have been edited don't work, but that's not my experience. I exported a couple of hundred images from Lightroom 2.0 to an SD card, plugged it into the frame, and they display perfectly. The display is bright and sharp with nice accurate color. The images I used were originally high-resolution scans of slides (from a Nikon film scanner). All have been cropped and adjusted in Lightroom, and some touched up further in Photoshop CS3. I exported 750x480 JPEGs which the frame accepts without any problem. We're giving this to my father-in-law for Christmas, and his entire slide collection (4400 slides) will comfortably fit on a 2GB SD card, extrapolating from the first couple of hundred. The manual says up to 8GB SDHC cards will work (and up to 9,999 images), which would allow me to export much larger versions of the images. (That will allow the zoom-in feature to have more to work with.)

I'm new to the whole digital picture frame thing. But yesterday i went back and forth from the store and tried 3 models, and i'm happy sticking with this one.

It has the most basic features of all of the 3 i've tried, but the biggest pricetag. But luckily its nearly perfect at what it does, so kudos to sony for that. There's no mp3/video player, no way to have separate photo albums unless you have separate memory cards for each. These are features that the other, cheaper frames had, but trying to use them was so frustrating, lag time in the controls, access time was slow, and they had an overall cheaper look and feel. The Sony is so seamless and easy to use, it's like day and night. The biggest difference with the Sony though is the quality of the LCD. The others you almost had to look dead or else the photos were so dark you couldn't see them, Sony's is nice and bright, even off angle.

Don't get confused by the other reviewer's cons, the clock mode works the way they meant it to, it displays the time and date the photo was taken, of course this isn't too useful, from what i've seen, there is no way to have the clock and picture display show the current time. Also in the user manual it lists the JPEG formats it's compatible with, i've had no problem with mine straight out of the camera or photoshop. I also converted all of my photos with pic2pic to get them to it's native resolution (800x480) to keep the file size small with no problems either.

All in all, a great little display, very stylish (i have my sony logo turned off), and the best i've seen if you don't need it to play videos or music, just a little expensive.

Works great if you load it with pictures right out of the camera. But images edited in Adobe photoshop and resaved as jpegs would just leave a "?" on the screen. Spent an hour with Sony online support but they had no answer other than the manuel says it might not work with files created on the computer. Oh Well !! back to the store it goes

The product is beautiful and the display is very clear - IF you can get your photos to show up! I had some photos adjusted by photoshop and all I get on the product is a box with a question mark in it.

It is so ridiculous that you can't up load altered jpegs on the frame - who doesn't change red-eye or crop or take out things from their photos. Its very short-sighted to have a frame that only takes camera-only photos. I have also wanted to put scanned photos on (from before I got my digital slr)...but no...it won't recognize those either.

I'm very VERY dissapointed in Sony's lack of foresight!

I also own a Kodak M1020 frame which I'll use for comparison. Both frames are very good and it really depends on features and appearance of the frame that appeals to you. I got the Kodak M1020 dirt cheap so I would call it the better value, but the Sony has a faster processor and slightly better picture quality.

The Sony uses 9 watts of power versus 6 watts for the larger Kodak - neither one will break the bank to operate, but the Sony will cost 50% more to run. The faster processor on the Sony comes at a cost, but I would say it is about 50% faster than the Kodak when displaying a grid of pics, selecting pics, accessing menu options, etc., so you get what you pay for.

I love the remote control on the Sony, although you have to be fairly close to the frame for it to work. The Kodak lacks a remote but can be controlled via touch sensitive invisible buttons on the front of the panel, which is really cool, but I'd really prefer using a remote control. You can, of course, control the Sony from the panel but the buttons for it are behind the frame. I'd say the Sony is more intuitive to use than the Kodak.

The Kodak frame can play back videos (as long as they don't exceed the resolution of the frame), includes a speaker, and can play mp3's - none of which can be said of the Sony. The Sony has a somewhat nifty calendar feature that'll display the date/time when the picture was taken along with the picture, or it can display the current date (via a calendar) and time along with an ever changing picture, and it also has an option to display three pictures at once.

Both the Kodak and Sony have several nice transition options when moving between pictures, but my favorite transition is the "pan & zoom", which can only be found on the Kodak.

It is much easier to transfer images to the Sony's internal memory (via an inserted memory card) than on the Kodak, which must be connected to a computer via USB. Note that you don't have to use the internal memory on either frame - both will default to the memory card if one is inserted. The Sony reduces the file sizes of images when transferring them allowing for many more pics to be stored internally. You'll have to do the resizing yourself for the Kodak. Both frames were able to read my 8gb SDHC cards as well as 4gb and 2gb SD cards.

Overall, I prefer the higher tech look and features of the Sony, but the Kodak is a formidable, worthy competitor, and I'm not ashamed of either. I give the Kodak 3.75 stars and the Sony 4.25 stars. I'd give the Sony 5 stars if it could do video and audio and you can bet the next generation of Sony picture frames will have those features.

I have had several digital picture frames over the years, but nothing comes close to this for image quality and just overall beauty. Sony really deserves the praise it received for this frame. On another note...all of my images were modified in Photoshop CS3 and saved as jpg. All of them play fine on this frame so not sure why the other poster had problems.