Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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506 of 524 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Works as billed, February 20, 2007
I've had one of these for a day, and it seems to do what the manufacturer says.
When properly formatted (see below), the pictures are bright and accurate -- just what you'd imagine a digital picture frame would look like.
Here are the two main lessons I've learned so far:
1. Formatting: Resize your pictures to fit within the frame's resolution of 480 pixels by 234 pixels. It will display bigger pictures (say, 2000x3000 pixels from a six-megapixel camera) but its algorithm for downsampling must be really stupid, as the results are awful -- the pictures look twinkly, oversharpened, overprocessed, and just plain ugly. Downsize them yourself, and all that goes away. If you have a lot of pix, this process can be somewhat tedious, but there is a very good freeware image manager called XnView that will do it on batches of pictures at once with a minimum of muss and fuss.
2. It won't display grayscale pictures (i.e., black-and-whites where the color count is reported as 256). To make these display, you have to convert them to RGB mode. They're still B&W in appearance, but internally they're full RGB, 16 million colors, and that makes little Coby very happy. Go figure.
When you downsize to 480x234, you get a very small file -- less than 30KB, oftentimes. That means you can store hundreds of pictures on even a small memory card of 256MB. Put it in the slot, set Coby to either go through them in order, or shuffle them, and sit back and watch your life pass before your eyes in dazzling color (or dazzling black and white, if you must).
My Coby was a little over $100, including shipping to Alaska. The image screen is only 7" diagonally, meaning you can't really display it on a wall, but it does make an excellent display for your desk. If they can get a wall-size version (say, 11x14) down under $500, I'll probably give that a try next.
In case it's not clear from the product writeup on Amazon, you have to plug this thing into a power socket to use it. There's no battery. And, even if there was, it wouldn't be too feasible -- you'd have to either take the thing apart every few hours to stick in new batteries, or keep it plugged into a charger part of the time. Mo' bettah just to give up and accept that it's an AC device, not a battery device.
Stan Jones
Anchorage, Alaska
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178 of 185 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
You get what you pay for..., May 3, 2007
We received a Philips digital photo frame as a gift, and had issues with it - lots of freezing/locking up. Looking to purchase a gift for 2 other people, we went with the Coby since it was half the price of the Philips. As the title says, you get what you pay for. I'd probably give it 2.5 stars if that was an option, but it's not a 3.
Pros:
* mp3 - very nice to be able to include music to go along with the photos
* remote - it's tiny, but does everything you need. Great idea
* setup/playback is relatively simple, in theory (see cons below)
Cons:
* picture quality pales in comparison to the Philips. From a distance, it's not bad, but up close the pictures definitely look digitized. We've put the same resolution photos on both, and you can clearly see a difference side by side
* loading photos is hit or miss. Click and drag interface is great, but it didn't always work. Some photos would copy immediately, others just wouldn't copy unless you tried to move them 8 or 9 times. Bulk copying was therefore impossible. Same issue with several memory cards, so I'm inclined to blame the frame. The current card is only 25% full, but the Coby won't let any more photos be copied over. [Using a card reader, all of the above works fine. But if you don't have one, you may run into issues. At the very least, buy the same type of card as your camera so you can copy via the camera instead of the frame]
* widescreen is good, and bad. Make sure that it's actually what you want. If all of your photos are from a widescreen still or video camera, you'll be fine. But standard digital photos are 4:3, not 16:9. Mixing and matching photos looks kind of cheesy in a slideshow.
Depending on what you're doing with it, it's not a bad purchase. To the less discerning photo enthusiast, it's fine. Other than the photo quality, all of the cons can be overcome. But if you really want a fine photo quality, I'd look elsewhere.
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28 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great for Price, March 25, 2007
Overall: This digital picture frame is a solid product with a moderate functionality. Very good for the price. Nicer picture frames will cost about twice as much.
Here's what I LIKE about this frame:
- Although the display is only 480x230, the image quality is very good.
- Rotary brightness dial.
- Interchangeable face plates (white or black).
- Extending support leg so the vertical angle of frame can be adjusted (mine is almost upright).
- Very nice compact remote remote control.
- Multiple card slots (CompactFlash, SD, USB FlashDrive, etc.).
- USB hookup (not sure if it's 1.1 or 2.0 -- haven't checked) (inserted cards show up as removable drives on Windows PC's).
- Audio/Video Out (but no cables).
- Will automatically start the photo slide show when powered up.
- Can be wall-mounted.
- Plays MP3's (I haven't tried this feature yet).
Here are my DISLIKES for the picture frame:
- When power is interrupted (either by off/on switch or pull the plug), the slideshow does not remember where it left off -- it will start at photo 1 again (not nice when you have 8,000 photos on it like I do).
- The built-in speaker constantly emits a slight hiss (white noise), even when the volume is turned completely down. I overcame this by inserting a rolled up piece of paper (kind of like a lollypop stick) into the Audio Out port, which tricks it into thinking there are headphones connected and kills the speaker connection.
- Does not have any sort of timer (but I don't think any digital photo frames do). It would be nice to have some sort of timer to have it come on only when people are expected home and awake (weeknights, weekends, etc.). It's not practical to turn on/off every time -- especially since it goes back to photo 1 on the slideshow.
- Odd screen ratio (16:9).
The 16:9 screen ratio is probably because Coby uses the same screen on this digital picture frame that they use on their portable DVD players, which also have the cinema 16:9 screen proportions. It a bit cumbersome to format photos to fit nicely on this screen, but it's not that bad if done as listed below.
Preparing Photos for the 16:9 display:
1. Download and install the freeware utility FastStone Photo Resizer (it's FREE).
2. Create a folder called "PhotoFrame" (e.g. "My Documents\My Pictures\PhotoFrame\")
3. Run FastStone Photo Resizer, select your photo source and add them to the left side by clicking the "Add" or "Add All" button.
4. Click the "Settings" button for "Output Format" and specify Quality=80, DCT Method=ISLOW, Photometric=(No Change), Smoothing=0, Progressive=<Unchecked>. Click OK.
5. Specify your output folder (the "PhotoFrame" folder from Step 2).
6. Click the "Advanced Options" button.
7. Under the "Resize" tab, specify In Pixels=<Selected>, Width=480, Height=270, Switch Width...=<Checked>, Preserve Aspect Ratio=<Checked>, Smart-Cropping=<Checked>. Click OK.
8. Set any other options, as desired (e.g. Rename, etc.)
9. Click Start.
10. When done, simply copy the files from the "PhotoFrame" folder to the media card on the picture frame.
The process above will create very small files that display nicely on the frame. Photos in the Portait orientation will be tall and skinny, but it's better than having heads completely cut off. Landscape photos will fit perfectly to fill the full picture frame's screen. A small slice is cropped out at the top and bottom of Landscape photos to make them fit the 16:9 format. Photos take up only about 35 KB/photo, so you can fit about 3,700 photos on a 128 MB card -- Nice, huh?!
I hope this was helpful! Enjoy!
UPDATE on 2008-03-31:
Although you can fit many of the small photos on a small memory card, I found that the photo frame only supports about 2000 file entries. So, if you put more than 2,000 photos on a card, after a while you'll wonder "why haven't I seen any of the photos from ...?" They're there, but the frame won't display them.
Also, I've had my photo frame running continuously for about 1 year and 3 months -- still working great.
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