Customer Reviews

eStarling 8-Inch Digital Wireless Picture Frame (Black)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(15)

 

 

This product works alright if you aren't running any wireless security (I had mixed results with WEP and WPA, currently I have it on a WEP network with linksys equipment and it is working ok).

The unit I got locked up out of the box due to a "memory stick media failure". There was no memory stick in the device. Tech support repeatedly asked me to unplug it and leave it off for at least 30 minutes, at which point it just got the same error. I got a memory stick (I have a camera that uses one) and after repeated jiggling finally got the error to clear and the frame works alright now, however I asked tech support several times for an RMA while I was fighting this problem and their response was negative. I could find no way to get tech support on the phone, and the email tech support seems to work from 4PM - midnight or something since that is when the responses come back.

Two of these frames I have gotten have had problems. The first thought it had a memory stick in it when it did not, and I had to return it. The second one worked ok. The third one will download messages, but will not download pictures. Still waiting for resolution on that one. Did I mention that their tech support is email only and awful?

If you get one of these and it is working out of the box and you don't have wireless problems, then probably things will work ok.

I bought this frame off of the estarling website. I normally don't write reviews, but I felt pretty strongly that other people should know what they're getting with this product since there aren't that many reviews out there.

Summary:
Pros - Looks nice, picture quality pretty good.
Cons - Expensive, no power button, website for managing frame is horrible, no button to refresh pictures from site, bad setup software, advertised features not implemented very well.

Hardware-wise, the frame looks quite nice, the image quality is pretty good -- at least as good as similarly sized frames that I have seen in stores. No complaints there. It would be nice if it had a power button.

The reason I bought this frame was so that I could set it up for my parents when I visited them over Christmas, then allow them to manage the photos wirelessly through the website. The best advertised feature, from my perspective, was the ability to email photos to the frame.

As a previous reviewer mentioned, you can not setup the frame to connect to your wireless network without a standalone computer. You download software from the seeframe website and connect the frame to your computer. The software scans wireless profiles on your computer and sends it to the frame. It will NOT scan for wireless networks on its own. This is somewhat annoying, but not a dealbreaker for me. It took me about an hour to get this working, b/c there are basically no diagnostic messages on the frame (wifi signal strength, what networks it sees, password wrong, etc..) I am usually really good with tech items so this is by no means as simple as it should be.

You have to register the frame with its unique registration code, and then set up an account on the see frame website. This is the "clearinghouse" for your photos. You can upload photos to this site, email photos to it through your seeframe email acct, connect rss feeds, and manage photos from here. Presumably, the frame periodically connects to the site and downloads the latest set of photos. There is no way that I can see where you can specify the refresh period, or to "force" a refresh. This kind of sucks since you just have to wait for some indeterminate time before you can start seeing photos that you've uploaded to the seeframe site.

Here is the really bad part -- the seeframe site is SUPER slow to update when you send photos by email and/or add photos to your rss feed. Case in point: I uploaded one photo each to my flickr and photobucket accounts over an hour ago (the corresponding rss feeds were already associated linked on my seeframe site). I forced a refresh and it said that the feed would reload in a couple of minutes. Those new photos still haven't appeared on my seeframe photos page.

Emailing photos is as slow, if not slower. I emailed myself a photo (< 1mb) last night at 7pm and received a notification at 3:26am that the photo had been received and was now on my seeframe site.

I can't understand the reason for the delay. I think there must be some poor intern at seeframe manually receiving these e-mails, stripping out the photo, then uploading it to the site and sending an e-mail confirmation. What else could explain the 6hr+ delay? Either automate it or hire some more interns, guys!!

You can also send text messages to the frame by writing them on the seeframe site. As far as I can tell, it seems to take about 20 minutes after you add the message for it to appear on your frame.

I am fairly disappointed with this purchase (on a scale of -1 to -10, it's probably a -9.5). The hardware is good, the idea is great, but if you want to use it for its wireless capabilities, then you will probably be disappointed too.

I bought the eStarling for the wireless connect and web accessibility - a gift for out of town Grandparents who think the best use of a computer is to look at pictures of the grandkids. All they do is keep it plugged in and the wireless up - great concept and I think this product will do it. I'm running an older Linksys Wireless G Access Point WAP54G router using open security and MAC filtering and ran into none of the security issues others have mentioned.

A couple glitches to be aware of.... I initially connected the frame to a hardwired desktop PC (no wireless) running XP. The netconfig program that you download and run would not see my wireless networks. It appeared that the radio was not working. Manual setup did not work either. Customer support was worthless and kept talking about router compatibility. Eventually I tried setting up on my laptop (with wireless). It turns out that the netconfig program simply copies the wireless network table from the computer rather than actually searching for them, like Windows does. All the networks I have ever been connected to showed up in the list. I selected my wireless network and then everything worked fine.

The other odd thing that happened was when I initially plugged the frame into the desktop PC, it launched some Adobe Photoshop downloader software that must have been lying in the weeds on my PC. Somehow this Adobe software, which was now automatically starting when I logged in (i.e. little icon in the lower right corner of the screen), was somehow messing with my system's Multimedia Audio Controller. I had no sound or microphone. Once I un-installed the Adobe Photoshop Downloader, the sound came back. Go figure....

Like I said a few glitches.

I have been able to upload photos and even email them to the frame (that's pretty cool). However, the seeframe.com web site has been horrendously slow which makes the uploading tedious. I have yet to try Flickr. eStarling is on to something with this product, they just need to polish the documentation and beef up the web servers.

I have written a positive review about a year ago after I had it for a short time. Now, a year later I would not recommend this product any more. For the same price you can find better frames. I can't change the rating any more, only the text.

The wireless network feature is a cool idea, but it is not that easy to set up. I got it done, so it;s not bad but many less technical people will have trouble.

The real deal breaker is that you have to use their server to do anything regarding the wireless features. Their web site is slow and badly designed. It does not work as a device within your home network. It only works through their server.

Another problem is that they don't seem to take privacy serious. My account on their server was compromised and I started to see Viagra advertising popping up on my device! Thanks very much.

Getting spam on your digital picture frame is annoying enough. The scary part is that the wireless configuration on this device is a simple text file. You wireless password is in plain text! Now that I know someone hijacked my account to access my device they might also be able to read this text file.

Beside this, the device locked up many times loosing connection.

I still think the actual image quality is decent, but I would not buy this product any more.

Be warned that this frame does not support WPA, which pretty much everyone uses for security on their wireless network these days. The company's website claims that it supports WPA on "some" routers, but I have tested with Linksys, D-Link, Buffalo, and SMC equipment with no luck. Customer support was no help, repeatedly emailing me back the same canned "because WPA is so non-standard, we don't know what vendors' products we support" response.

Once you roll your wireless network back to the proven-insecure WEP standard, the frame works pretty well. The RSS feature is handy and the ability to email pictures to the frame is nice. The 800x600 resolution is good, and the backlight moderate enough not to be obnoxious at night, though it's not bright enough to be seen clearly in well lighted rooms during the day.

Other than the requirement for an insecure wireless network and the lack of real customer support, this is a perfectly decent product for the price.

I've been using this frame sense Christmas of '08.

I have it set to turn off at 11pm and turn back on at 9am. Every other morning there is a message saying "FAILED TO CONNECT TO NETWORK". I have to manually scan and accept the network to connect to the frame when this happens. When I emailed tech support about this, this is the exact copy and paste reply I received, typos and all:

"please try moving the frame closer to the hub for a better connection.In the mean time,please be advised to change your router as OPEN mode or set it running IEE802.11b&g,WEP mode ,for the frame can detect the Wifi more easily."

I responded that the router is 15 feet away line of site from the frame and shows up as full signal strength on the frame. And that changing the security mode to a less safe one was not an option and I received this email:

"Our apologies, We have not found good way to solve this issue yet."

So as it stands I have a frame that requires me to manually connect it to my network almost every morning. I haven't tested it yet but I think this issue can be avoided by never putting the frame to sleep, letting it run 24/7, but I assume when you do that you hinder the life of the LCD, but at least you have a product that will do what it should.

The suggestion to change my encryption from WPA to WEP was ridiculous. The product literature says the frame works with WPA but it clearly has a hard time, and making my network less secure as a "fix" for the problem is not really a fix at all.

I've purchased 2 eStarling frames. I purchased the first one from Thinkgeek in December 2007 as a christmas present for my parents and received a model (version 1) that was widely documented to be defective. The frame never worked and I returned it losing shipping costs.

While I was researching problems with the first frame, I read reviews that version 3 of the frame had fixed the problems with the earlier models. So, I purchased another frame directly from eStarling.

This version of the frame looked a lot better (no external wireless antenna) and worked the first time I turned it on. However, once I turned it off it never worked again.

I'm a technology professional with over 15 years experience hacking my way through poorly documented and flaky software and hardware and this product is difficult (if not ultimately impossible) for me to get working.

Tech support from the company is bad. After trying everything I could think of to get the frame working, I emailed eStarling tech support. Here is a sample of the style of their responses:

"That's really confused we haven't ever heared this before. Can
you please check if any settings of your router you setted conflict
with your frame?"

This just isn't professional or helpful.

As much as I want this frame to work, it doesn't. Unless you're a networking device guru who enjoys a challenge, I'd stay away from this company and their products.

This is just the frame I've been looking for. It has wireless connectivity, can be programmed to turn on and off, and works after a 5 minute setup right out of the box. I saw the reviews here after Christmas and would suggest that those people come back and revisit them. Giving this product 1 star over a temporary frustration of the device that seems to be fixed now is just unfair.

Setup was very simple. I just plugged the frame into my computer, setup my wireless, went to the seeframe website and registered my frame to an account and a message popped up on the frame saying everything was setup. I setup an RSS feed and about 2 minutes later my pictures from Picasa started to appear on the frame. I also tested the email to frame capability by taking a picture with my camera phone. I emailed the picture from my phone to the frames email address and a minute later that picture entered the rotation on the frame.

The screen is pretty beautiful. It has a 800x600 8" LCD. A lot of the other frames use a streched 16:9 LCD or have lower resolutions like 600x480 or lower. Another great feature that is simple but not many digital frames have is the ability to turn the frame on and off at specified times. One reason that I could think to stop using a digital frame is having to turn it off at night and remembering to turn it on in the morning.

The real key to this frames success is making it so simple that once it is setup it is as easy to use as any other standard picture frame on the mantel. It constantly has new pictures automatically refreshed as they are loaded onto Picasa with my Eye-Fi Card(another great complimentary product). It also turns on and off by itself so it doesn't light up the dark house all night with a constant slideshow. Basically, I don't have to pay any attention to it EVER and I always have new pictures to look at. This frame enables digital pictures to finally be shown easier than film!

I wanted to use this product for simple non-wifi picture display but it would not function as designed.

After hours spent deciphering and following cryptic email instructions they asked me to upgrade the firmware.

After following the upgrade instructions the frame still does not work and now the functions of the buttons are reversed!

They have refused to send a new item or repair this item. They are now suggesting that for $100 more they will send me a new model as mine is discontinued! Outrageous...why would anyone part with more money to replace a non-working product from a lousy company?

Their software quality is poor and their so-called tech support follows the same standard.

Unlike some others I didn't have any problem getting this unit setup on Grandma's wifi network with WEP security.

Over time, however, it did need to be rebooted when it lost connectivity with the network. This is made most difficult because there's no power switch - you have to unplug the power supply connector.

The picture was decent, though the frame's firmware was apparently hard-coded to perform randomly selected but uniformly buttugly transitions between each photo. I never was able to find a way to select just a nice slide or fade. And the frame's UI, implemented by impenetrably black buttons located on the back side of the bezel, was the suckiest slideshow controller I've ever used.

The unit did the very basics of what was advertised, and I have to say that I had the best luck simply emailing individual photos to the frame's email address. However it was entirely unclear what its capacity was and when it would decide to cycle out old photos and refresh new photos from the server.

I thought the RSS feature would be the best aspect of this system since I could subscribe the frame to feeds from albums I already had online. Although it would pick up photos from the feed, again it was entirely unclear how to force it to refresh itself from new data in the feed. In the end it would just cycle through the same dozen or so photos, leaving hundreds from the feed undisplayed. Sometimes a reboot would force it to fetch new content, other times not.

Managing feeds from the Seeframe website was a totally bogus exercise in frustration, even after they did an entire rewrite of the site circa 2008. The whole thing smelled like the firmware, software and web apps were poorly implemented by offshore contractors not directly connected with the company. Furthering that impression, the online help (don't even hope for a real manual) is poorly translated from somewhere else. They've even outsourced the "customer support" to some online service that is no more than a glorified FAQ.

Some company is going to do this right someday, there are a fair number of players out there now with wifi/internet connected frames. Skip this one.