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200 of 201 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
One Of The Best Digital Picture Frames I Have Tested, January 20, 2008
Digital photo frames have become a BIG seller over the past 12 to 18 months. There are so many makes and models to choose from, so getting a good quality digital photo frame is not an easy task. This is why I began testing digital photo frames a few months ago. In cooperation with a local electronics store, I have been allowed to try out several frames by Kodak, Pandigital, HP, Siren and Smartparts. My biggest surprise is that many of the frames have a fairly low resolution, even with some of the bigger frames (10 inches and up). Most of them seem to hover around 640x480, which is too low in my opinion, especially for a display larger than 7 inches. I also found that many of the frames have a 16:9 ratio, which tends to distort the pictures or requires you to do some fancy cropping to retain the original aspect ratio of the pictures. This aspect ratio changes resolutions to unusual sizes like 480x234 and 800x480. Several also have lackluster contrast ratios, and a few of the frames produced a washed out look to the colors of my photos. After testing 13 different frames I decided to purchase the Pandigital 8-inch LCD Digital Picture Frame (model: DPF802) for myself.
This Pandigital model has a 4:3 aspect ratio, so the pictures don't get stretched or require special cropping by the end user. The resolution is 800x600, which is perfectly adequate for a frame of this size. The contrast and backlighting is nearly perfect, offering bright, colorful photos that look just as good in the frame as they do on my computer. The Pandigital DPF802 has memory slots for SD, XD, Memory Stick, Memory Stick Duo and CompactFlash cards, and also allows you to use a USB flash drive. Of course the frame comes with 128MB of built-in memory, but that is not nearly enough memory to store all of my favorite photos. Still, the built in memory gives you a good start on displaying your most favorite pictures, especially if you crop them to 800x600 before loading them into the frame. File format compatibility is about normal, compaired with all of the other digital photo frames that I tested; allowing JPEG, MP3, MPEG1, MPEG4 and Motion JPEG AVI. There is a handy remote that allows you to perform all of the functions that you can from the bottons on the back of the frame itself. I have found that the remote must be pointed at the frame directly, and from a fairly close distance (I recommend no further than 8 feet) in order to function properly. It offers customized settings for your picture slide show, including a handful of useful (yet somewhat bland) transition effects, speed between photos (only 3 speeds, which even the slowest setting is only about 20 seconds), a scheduled auto on/off timer, power saving auto-shutoff mode, and a few more. You can even use the calendar feature to set the frame to display a slide show on a particular day and time. And speaking of the calendar, you can set the frame to display a calendar and clock, while running a thumbnail sized slideshow of your photos off to the side. I enjoy this feature a great deal. The audio quality for MP3 playback is only fair, since the speakers are extremely small. If you want some gentle, soft music to play in the background while your slideshow plays, you may find this feature useful. I have decided to just leave out the audio entirely, as it just doesn't sound very good and becomes a distraction if the frame is left on for an extended period of time.
Overall, I am extremely happy with the Pandigital 8-inch LCD Digital Picture Frame. I am not a professional, but I am an I.T. technician and serious digital photographer, and I have compaired this frame against 12 other market leading frames, and I am a very picky consumer when it comes to quality and performance. The video playback is dissapointing, offering rather slow frame rates, which causes choppy motion. However, I purchased the frame to display photos only, and for that this frame does an excellent job. How will this frame hold up over the months and years to come? I guess only time will tell. I will certainly edit this review, at a later time, if I find that the frame begins to malfunction. For now I am convinced that this frame is one of the best buys for the money. The below average video playback, thin sounding audio output, range restriction of the remote control, and lack of more customized speed and transition settings for the slideshow function prevent me from giving this frame any higher than a 4 star rating. But if you are looking for a medium sized frame that will produce bright, colorful, high resolution photos in their native 4:3 aspect ratio, then the Pandigital 8-inch LCD Digital Picture Frame deserves your serious consideration.
P.S. I recommend purchasing/using a memory card for storing your photos, for use with this frame. I experienced frustratingly slow and unreliable results when plugging the frame into my PC with the provided USB cable. You can always transfer your photos from the memory card to the frame's built-in 128MB memory if you wish, which will be much faster and more reliable than plugging the frame directly into your computer for photo transfers.
*** UPDATE (2/07/2008): I forgot to include the dimensions of this frame and the LCD display. The LCD panel itself measures 8" diagonally. The overall frame dimensions are 8 and 1/2" high, 10 and 1/4" wide, and roughly 1 and 1/2" deep. I should also note that one frustration I have with this photo frame is that you cannot power the unit on or off with the remote control. This is because the physical power switch is a mechanical slide type. So, the user will always have to reach behind the frame in order to power the display on and off. I have mine mounted on the wall, so reaching this switch has proven to be a bit of a challenge. Still, given the wonderful display properties and impressive feature-set of this digital photo frame, I stand by my original score. =o)
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29 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fast, easy to use, and large 800x600 resolution, April 6, 2008
This photo frame gives you instant gratification even without a computer. Simply take the memory card out of your digital camera, stick it in one of the 4 slots:
Slot 1 - Secure Digital or MultiMedia Card
Slot 2 - Compact Flash
Slot 3 - Memory Stick
Slot 4 - xD Memory Card,
turn on the power switch and the slide show starts immediate.
There is a remote if you want to toggle between the memory cards, or bring up thumbnail mode to select a photo, choose transitions, select speed of slide show, etc. But I just use it in whatever mode it came with and it all works fine.
Connecting to the computer was not a problem for me. Perhaps it depends on the laptop and drivers. However for my Lenovo T61p, I simply connected the included USB cable, the frame was recognized by my computer, all the drives and the internal memory. Copying files over was as simple as dragging and dropping.
One note, because of the FAT file format, you cannot drag too many files into the root directory of any of the memory cards, or internal memory. I think the limit for FAT is 200 and FAT16 is 512. Instead, I created subfolders numbered 00, 01, 02, 03, etc, and dragged a couple hundred files into each. The frame will randomly cycle photos from any and all subfolders.
The other thing I did was resize all of my jpegs to 800x600 so that I can get the most number of pictures into the internal memory. I used a freeware program called resizejpegs v1.00. It does a great job of allowing you to select a folder and resizes jpegs to the desired size. You can choose whether to overwrite the original file, or create a subfolder where all of the resized files go.
To me, the frame was very easy to use, and does not require a computer if all you want to do is preview photos from your memory cards. Resizing the jpegs is a good idea for snappy transitions between photos, although they claim to support pictures up to 12M pixels. Since the native resolution is 800x600 (more than other digital picture frames), if you resize to 800x600, the average file size is only 80KB, you will get about 1500 pictures on the 128 MB internal memory.
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18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wonderful Beautiful Frame, January 27, 2008
My Pandigital was a gift from my husband. Mine is the 128 MB model. I found it very easy to use with my photos, video and music. I attached a little MP3 speaker and slid it behind the frame for better sound. I also bought a custom Pandigital wood and bronze frame at Dillards that matches my home decor a little more. Although the model I saw at Bed Bath and Beyond comes with a black and brown frame mine came with only the black and acrylic. The acrylic frame is nothing that I will ever use. This frame will run all day and never get warm. The frame can be viewed at all angles without any loss of quality. Great gift for a digital camera person. Now I can view all my macro camera photos with my favorite music.
I used Power Point to create text and photos for a scrapbook effect using old family photos with different backgrounds and saved the presentation in JPG format and placed them on a ditital SD card and it looked perfect on the digital frame. I also used a few slideswhow presentations from Proshow gold by Photodex and saved them in MPEG-4. All the photos, sound, video and transitions within the presentations of Pro Show were smooth and the audio was great.
This a very useful beautiful product. This would make a very nice gift for those family members that do not have a computer and never get to see all those digital photos that you take and for those of us who take digital photos that we love and be able to share them as a moving art show in our living room.
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