Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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346 of 351 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great Frame and Picture Quality with One Major Flaw! , December 16, 2007
After doing extensive research on other brands, we settled on this frame because of the price and features. After we bought it, we were pleasantly suprised to learn it is rated the highest by Consumer Reports magazine, and now we know why.
The picture quality is excellent. I started off with a free frame (gift) from another manufacturer that had half this resolution, and it did not give my pictures justice. Upgrading to this frame made a difference in the world to my picture quality. Do not buy anything less than 800x600, or your pictures just won't look good.
My favorite feature about this frame is the auto-sizing software available as a free download from the manufacturer's website. All you do is download it onto your computer, and any pictures you have on your hard drive will automatically be resized when transferred to your frame using the software.
One user complained about how slow it was transferring from a memory card onto the frame. This is because the frame automatically resizes your pictures to 800x600. This does take a little longer, but saves you hours of manually resizing your photos for the frame, so this *IS NOT* a flaw.
The one and only flaw I experienced (and maybe I have a defective unit) was I spent 2 hours copying thousands of photos onto the internal memory in the picture frame. So, I went and took more pictures with my digital camera, and slipped the memory card into the frame. I hit "copy" so it would copy from my card onto the internal memory. Little did I know, and the manual *DOES NOT* say this, but doing this will override any existing pictures on the memory. You can imagine how FURIOUS I was when I discovered that the thousands of photos I had stored on the frame were completely wiped out, and in their place were the 13 pictures I had copied. Please test this feature out first to see if it is indeed working on your unit before you find out the hard way, like I did. I plan on writing customer service about this (and hope I can get someone who speaks understandable English)
and seeing if this is a known flaw. The workaround on this would be to load the photos on your card onto your PC, then load them onto the internal picture frame. This is a major inconvenience, in my opinion.
I have not tried the movie files feature on this yet because it does not support the version my camera uses, and I am too lazy to figure out how to convert the movie files.
The sound is pretty decent, and adding mp3's to the slideshow is such a neat feature.
I also love the motion sensor on this frame. I never have to remember to turn the frame on and off.
All in all, this is a wonderful picture frame for ease of use, picture quality, and overall features. I would have rated it a 5 if not for the one serious flaw I mentioned. As a matter of fact, if this frame did not shine in the other areas I mentioned, I would have rated it less than a 4 because of the serious flaw. But, it has many saving graces, so a 4 is suitable, in my humble opinion. I will post an update from customer service once I hear back from them. I hope it will be easily fixed with a future firmware upgrade, etc.
****UPDATE**** 12/22/07 - I didn't get anywhere with customer service, but found out on my own when you insert a memory card and copy it to your frame, IT DOES NOT wipe out your existing pictures as originally thought.
It just overrides them with the new pictures and will not display the old pictures until you delete the new ones out. At this point, the old pictures are not listed on any menu when viewing from the frame. You have to hook up your frame to your computer, and navigate around until you see a folder in the software called "Spart Pic Software." This is where the old pictures are placed. Why this folder is not on the frame itself is beyond me, and why you have to hook up the frame to a computer to even see it is even dumber. And why this is NOT mentioned anywhere in the manual is just even stupider! (Is that even a word?) This is still a major flaw in my opinion. Why can't it just simply add the new pictures into the existing pictures folder without creating all of these inconvenient problems???? This is something I hope they fix with a firmware update.
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112 of 115 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Does What I Want, But Not As Advertised, October 12, 2007
This product seemed to work great at first, but then I started adding a few more pictures from my 7 megapixel camera and the slideshows constantly froze on random pictures. Exchanged the first frame (thank you Amazon) and the second frame did exactly the same thing. After a few hours of trial and error, I finally got the pictures suitable and the slideshows do not freeze anymore. In short, I found that cropping my pictures from my camera was not enough ... apparently the file sizes were too big for the slideshow to handle, so I had to scale the pictures down too. The pictures still look great on the frame (no loss of quality after resizing) and this would not have been a big deal at all if it would have been mentioned in the instructional manual. The manual claims that you can take your memory card straight from your camera, plug it into your digital frame, and the slideshow should work. Didn't work at all like that for me with two different frames. In addition, the control buttons on the back of my frame do nothing. Thank goodness the remote control works.
I love the quality of the pictures, the frame itself looks beautiful, and I have it working the way I want it to now ... so I will happily keep this frame, but the frame does not exactly work as advertised.
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118 of 124 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
You can't write this stuff...one problem after the next!, November 16, 2008
I can't believe that Consumer Reports recommended anything from this company. I got this frame for my husband as an anniversary gift in August, and I still don't have a working frame (I write this on November 16). The first frame never turned on. It was completely dead. I tried running the update that Smartparts wants you to do online, and that did nothing. I contacted the company and was told I would receive a new power cord. The cord never came. I called back and was told that the cord wouldn't have fixed the problem (which made me realize that this must be a frequent issue) and that they had no record of my phone call. They asked me to run the update again. Nothing. They emailed me a return label and I sent the frame to them for repair for replacement. I got my second frame, but they didn't send back the power cord, the remote, or the stand. Kind of tough to use a frame with no power source. After a week or so, I got those parts and the did turn on...for a day. The morning after I got it, I turned it on and got a white screen with thin, vertical stripes. I called and emailed Smartparts again. This time, the man I was speaking to asked me to stop venting to him (I am super polite on the phone...it's the teacher in me). He told me that my SanDisk was the problem. I tried fixing it by running the online update AGAIN, but nothing changed. He said it might work again if I got an SD card. I told him I was not willing to purchase a separate memory card for a frame that has continued to fail for me and is supposed to work via the USB cable that comes with it (which, by the way, they recommend NOT using right in the user's manual). I insisted that I wanted to return it for a refund. He refused to offer a refund, but sent me a return label after I pushed the issue. That was over a month ago. I still haven't received the third frame. I have contacted them twice about the third frame, and both times was told it would ship the next day.
Basically, I really wish that I hadn't ever purchased anything from Smartparts. Only one customer service rep. I spoke to was helpful. The others were evasive and frustrating. I have spent so much time and energy on getting this frame thing to work. I am taking the time to write this so people can go another route. There are more reputable companies out there who make similar products. I highly encourage you NOT to purchase an item from Smartparts.
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