Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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70 of 70 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Attractive, works well (but see update), September 8, 2007
[ September 2007 ]
Good:
- Bright high-resolution display. (Watch out for the DPF-0801, lower resolution and less internal memory.)
- MosaicView is occasionally nice, though we don't usually use it. With it, you get a new picture every few seconds but any given picture stays displayed for 4x as long.
- It hung when I had a 0-length JPEG file, but otherwise has been 100% reliable for displaying stills.
Bad:
- Does not include a USB cable to connect it to a computer.
- When I tried connecting it to a computer, the connection was unreliable. However, I wasn't planning to use the internal memory anyway, so I didn't try to figure out where the problem was - could have been the frame, the computer, or the cable. I use pictures on memory cards.
- Memory Stick protrudes past the right edge of the frame. SD is better.
- If you have many pictures and want to select a particular one to display, it's tedious to get to it.
- Documentation is a bit unclear on how to get to the menu. In particular, you can't get to the menu while a slide show is running. You have to stop the slide show by clicking the menu button, and *then* press-and-hold the menu button to get to the menu.
Comments:
- Remember this is only a 0.5 megapixel display, so shrink your photos down to match. They'll only be about 64K with moderate compression, and you can fit an awful lot of those on a modest memory card. Improves performance too.
- It has a number of transition modes, but the only one I like is dissolve. Surprisingly, it doesn't have any simple wipes or "scroll-in" transitions.
Wish list:
- Audio would be fun, though I'm not sure I'd actually use it.
- Display captions, timestamps, et cetera.
- Automatic brightness based on room lighting. (We just keep our at max bright all the time, but that does light up the room when it's dark.)
- A WiFi connection would be awfully nice.
- Have a mode where MosaicView occasionally displays a picture using the full screen. (It already displays "favorites" full screen, but I mean something more random, where any picture might be full screen.)
- Frame can be physically displayed either in landscape or portrait, but the UI is landscape and that's the orientation it displays the pictures. There should be a portrait mode where it displays the UI and pictures in that orientation. You could work around this by manually rotating the pictures, but that would be tedious.
Haven't tried:
- Video
- xD, Compact Flash, USB drive
[August 2009]
I bought a half-dozen of these for Christmas presents in '07. Of those, two have failed after 18 months or so - powers on to a blank screen, then sometimes to a screen with vertical bands and/or a distorted version of the Westinghouse logo. I'm quite disappointed.
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80 of 81 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Very nice... no gimmicktry, just what it says it is., November 30, 2007
Westinghouse DPF-0802
800x600pixels, USB/miniUSB to 128MB internal, all common cards, 6 3/8" x 4 3/4" display area (8" diagonal), 10" x 8 3/8" outer frame dimensions (measured).
No extra border between lcd and frame -nice.
Retains last setting after being unplugged (checked up to 24 hours).
Nice display quality.
Outer frame is quite nondescript, a plus as it does not compete with images. Does not look 'cheap' or flimsy, some others do.
Whining sound is a non-issue.
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Professionally, I'm an imaging scientist (not kidding, we really exist), so choosing this model took a fair bit of time thanks to the relatively difficult process of finding any technical description of the photo frames currently on the market, or even accurate general descriptions for that matter. Then there is the issue that most of these are not available to see in a store.
The goal:
..to find a frame for my grandparents, who are not computer savvy, or even own one for that matter. It would be best if, after setting it up and shipping it to them, that all they had to do was plug it in and turn it on. This model seems to satisfy that requirement.
Even with the 'mere' 128MB internal memory it'll hold over 800 pics (your mileage will vary) that have been scaled to 800x600pix in a good quality jpeg format.
I've asked the rest of the family to send pics to be included and doubt I'll run out of space. (I did buy a 1GB SD card just in case)
Of the 20+ frames I sorted through this was one of a handful that did not seem to hide critical specs in its description. The worst offenders were ones with an 8", or even 10"!, diagonal display size yet the resolution was 480x324pix. Beware 'bargains' and watch those model numbers.
Others of interest in this price range:
Pandigital PAN 803-BC - which *may* be the same core as this one..???
Catronics PF080-b
SmartParts SP8EM or SP8MIX - ??only dif is frame??
Whining:
Someone complained about a whining noise. Yes, it is there, but only when you have the display at less than maximum brightness. (it's the voltage regulator(stepper, divider, whatever) for the light source)
If you've ever heard someone's hearing aid start to squeal, when you're across the room, this sound is somewhat softer.
I see no reason to ever have the display at anything other than max brightness, so this is a non-issue for me.
Sound:
Don't overlook the fact that this unit has no sound. Just a reminder. It plays the low-res (640x480) videos my still camera takes just fine, sans sound. I have yet to see if the slide show can go through a mix of pics and vids.
Contrast:
In preparing pics for the frame it turned out to be helpful to give the pics a slight bias. Shadows lost a little detail if the min value in a pic was zero. This is not unexpected, is very minor, and is easy to tweak in the batch processing. These are not calibrated displays, yours may well differ.
Color depth:
I found no spec for this but, after testing, believe it to be roughly 16bit.
Power supply:
Yes(!) this unit has a Level IV power efficiency adapter. There are still a few electronic gadgets out there that were actually manufactured long ago enough to still come with the old, heavy, transformer-based wall wart. (my ISP just sent me a new router with one, grrrr)
Resizing:
In an initial test I took a few quick pics at the lowest resolution of my camera, 1600x1200pix. Note that this is a simple factor of two in each dimension as compared to the frame. Take the card out of the camera, put it in the frame, turn it on, bingo - you'll get a slideshow.
One tiny annoyance- the resampling was definitely aliased. Others didn't notice, my family won't notice, but some of you may. Foregoing the details, this particular case (factor of a power of 2) is about as computationally simple as can be to reach an anti-aliased solution. Yet it doesn't.
So, if you're picky, do all the resizing on a computer... GIMP with "David's Batch Processor"(not me) is nice, free, and open source; many of the image management tools will likely also do a nice job - Picajet, Picasa, etc.; and for us geek's there's always ImageMagick, IDL, pdl, Matlab, & _your fave here_.
Hope this helped.
I'm not the gadget type, but I'm fairly excited to give my 92yo grandparents a dynamic reminder of friends and family spanning their lives... including pics of their parents from over a century ago!
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60 of 60 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The creme de la crem of smaller picture frames, hi-res and full on memory., May 1, 2007
This is a bit more in price than some of the smaller frames, but this one is outstanding in quality. Again, it has the standard multi-media card reader, MP3/MPEG playback, and 128mb internal memory (model 801 westinghouse has only 8mb). But the greatest feature of this model is the 800x600 pixel quality high resolution screen, which is even better than the 10 inch frame by westinghouse(800x480). Hard to beat quality for about $60 more than standard 7" frames with 480x234 quality. This frame also features the mosaic view (4 pictures side by side rotating), which is great looking on the high resolution. Check this one out, worth the investment.
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