Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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73 of 76 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great product at a great price! Bad reviewers must have gotten different product!, May 21, 2007
I see all these bad reviews listed and I think to myself, "Did they get the same product I got?" I picked mine up from a major Big Box retailer, one you have to be a member of, and no, this one doesn't own Wal-Mart as well, it is the other big one! Better price than listed here also.
To the heart of the matter, I plugged in the included USB cable, my computer popped up a notice about new hardware being found, shortly after this, I opened My Computer and saw a new hard drive listed as Pandigital. This of course was the onboard memory of the Pandigital PhotoFrame. I moved all the shipping images off to a folder on my hard drive, then started copying photos from my PC to the Pandigital drive. While I was at it, I also copied over a few instrumental mp3 files. When file copy was done, I removed the cable, pointed remote at the PhotoFrame and clicked on Start Slideshow, to my amazement, the photos started cycling and the MP3 files played softly in the background. Using the volume control on the remote, I was able to set the volume just where I wanted it. The pictures are all very well lit, colors look true to life, just as if they were real photos. My 83 year old mom remarked, "How do you get the photos in there, from the back? She thought they were actual printed photos.
I think this is a very well thought out frame , better features than the highly touted Philips frames, and for a lot less money! The included decorative frames, dark Ebony wood or clear acrylic should go with almost any decor and the neatly designed remote fits right in the CompactFlash slot when not in use.
I used Photoshop to size all my photos to 800 x 600 (or 600 by whatever for portrait shots), using pre-recorded actions and automation features I as able to resize them all and compress them for best file size (used "Save for Web" feature to optimize all my photos). They all look great, and at these sizes, I could get several hundred photos on the included onboard memory of 128mb.
If you bought one of these before and were unhappy, try picking one up again, I don't think you will be dissapointed!
An onboard battery would be nice, but for most it will reside in one place on a table top, for these places, the enclosed A/C adapter will do fine (there is no battery power for this unit, A/C only!)
The included speakers were not too loud, but reproduced the music accurately and were loud enough to provide a soothing soundtrack to the slideshow. I watched for over an hour straight, amazed at how well all the photos looked.
If you have a digital camera, you owe it to yourself to buy a digital photo frame, finally your images are unlocked from inside your computer or those tiny flash memory devices. Most women I talk to say they hate digital cameras because they want real photos they can hold and see, well now they can.
I love my Pandigital frame!
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24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Pandigital 8" - overall good value, but some reservations, December 22, 2007
I purchased two Pandigital 8" digital frames (model PAN80-2) as gifts for family members recently, and in a nutshell I'd say I am fairly pleased with the product. Here are the pros and cons as I see them after setting up the two frames I bought.
Pros
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a) Good picture quality, once you've tweaked the brightness, contrast, and color settings. Picture display is very sharp and clear. This is especially true if you resize your pictures to match the unit's native resolution of 800x600.
b) Menu is easy to use and navigate, in general. Make sure to read the user's guide, though - there are some menu choices that aren't immediately available from "slide show" mode.
c) Supports all major memory card formats as well as USB. The USB connection works well (at least, it has with my Dell desktop), making it easy to transfer pictures to the frame's 128 MB internal memory.
d) Plays MP3 music files (if any are present on the memory card or internal memory) while displaying pictures in slide show mode.
Cons
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a) The 128 MB internal memory would not accept more than roughly 25 MB of files when I tried to copy them from my computer via the USB connection. This happened on both units I bought. The only solution was to reformat the device as a FAT32 drive, after which the full 128 MB became available. This could be a big problem for non-technical people who want to use the internal memory instead of an SD or CF memory card. The workaround, of course, it to use an external card and forget about the 128 MB internal memory.
b) The workmanship and finish of the frame is not great. It looks kind of "cheap" upon close inspection, and there is substantial variability in appearance between different units. For example, the white inset border around the LCD screen was 2 cm wide on one unit, but only 1.7 cm on the other, such that there was a visible black border around the LCD screen on one unit that was not present on the other. It may not sound like a big deal, but think it demonstrates a lack of quality control on the production line.
c) The choice of slideshow speeds is too limited. There is only "fast", "medium", and "slow", where slow means about 10 or 11 seconds per picture. I would have liked a few more choices, especially on the "slow" end (e.g. a 20 or 30 second setting). "Fast" is useless, in my opinion, at about 3 seconds per picture.
d) Video playback doesn't work well and is not integrated into the picture slideshow mode. I could not get certain AVI files to play at all, and even if I could, the lack of integration with slideshow mode would render this "feature" pretty useless, in my opinion.
e) "Shuffle" mode does not work properly. It seems to be more like a pseudo "random" play mode, where pictures can be repeated before others are even displayed one time. In addition, the "shuffle" playback order is always the same when you start the slide show. For example, it will always display pictures 1, 16, 5, 22, 34, etc. in that order, which is not a true shuffle at all. If you turn shuffle mode off, then pictures are displayed in the default order they are stored on the memory device -- but this is not necessarily alphabetical order! Bottom line, you can't really control the playback order of your pictures, which I find to be moderately annoying.
In summary, this frame is a decent value for the money (I paid just under $130), but there are some drawbacks and quirks you should keep in mind before purchasing. Once you get it setup and working, you'll probably be very pleased with its picture slide show and music playback abilities. I would look elsewhere if you are interested in video playback.
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21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
This is a good DPF - I'll buy it again, December 8, 2007
I purchased the Kodak SV1011 and Pandigital DPF80-2 photo frames recently during my business trip to USA. Paid 169.99 for SV1011 and 139.99 for PAN80-2 (in store price excl tax, not mail order). Both models have universal voltage AC adapters so it works outside USA.
The SV1011 is not actually a 16:9 display. If you check the specification from Kodak website, the display area is 8.9 × 5.3 in. (225 × 135 mm) - that's 15:9. 800 x 480 also means it's a 15:9 display, unless the pixels are not square.
I am not a professional photographer but my main camera is Canon EOS 5D with a few L lenses. I capture in RAW and convert & scale the images to JPEG using Canon DPP s/w. For the SV1011, I tried scaling it to 15:9 800 x 480 and 15:9 1600 x 960.
The SV1011 has a serious problem with its scaling engine. When fed with images at its native resolution of 800 x 480, the picture looks very soft. I can also easily see jagged lines. When fed with 1600 x 960 images, the picture looks very sharp. If the image is not scaled to multiple of 800 x 480 (e.g. whatever native resolution that comes out from the camera), sometimes the image does not look good (again, scaling engine problem).
I don't have such problem with PAN80-2 - the scaling engine is perfect. I get the sharpest image at its native resolution of 800 x 600 (4:3). Testing with the images created for SV1011, the 800 x 480 images look sharp on PAN80-2. But when displaying pictures with blue sky (e.g. the PanDigital demo picture with the boy holding a kite with blue background), it reveals that the LCD panel of PanDigital does not have enough bits. I guess it's a 6-bit panel, but it does not have enough steps to display the blue sky smoothly. The same picture when displayed on SV1011 shows very smooth blue sky but the edges on the boy's shirt look very jaggy.
The PAN80-2 has better color/hue and contrast/brightness control compared to SV1011. Skin tones look pale with the original setting but can be adjusted. The skin tones on SV1011 looks too saturated and cannot be adjusted further except for brightness.
The SV1011 has faster USB speed (PAN80-2 USB is really slow) and better GUI for managing folders. The PAN80-2 does not show folders in memory card but just display all images from different folders.
The PAN80-2 has separate slots for different types of memory cards - I can load 4 types of memory cards simultaneously compared to 2 for SV1011. If the slide show is running on the SV1011 and another card is inserted, SV1011 automatically recognizes that and starts slide show from the newly inserted card.
After showing both DPF to my family, they all like PanDigital 80-2 better. If I want to buy another DPF, very likely I'll go for PanDigital.
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