Customer Reviews: Read 24 more reviews...
 Great digital frame, very easy to use! November 24, 2008
120 out of 126 found this review helpful
I searched websites trying to find an easy to use photo frame with 4:3 ratio and good resolution. I found this one at a store and thought I'd try it out. I was worried it would be difficult to set up given that I have a Mac computer. This wasn't the case at all. I hooked it up to the computer with the USB cable, highlighted the photos I wanted on the frame and drug them to the frame's icon on my desktop. So easy.
The only thing I didn't like (and it could just be my camera, 5 megapixel) is that the pictures that are vertical were not as clear as the horizontal pictures. Overall, I think it is a good frame and easy to use.
 It's widescreen.... December 3, 2008
46 out of 53 found this review helpful
Apparently I should have done a little math on the resolution on this one before I trusted the picture and other reviews. I watched different deals on-line for about a week only considering non-widescreen frames.
Note: for those of you who don't know, widescreen frames are a bad idea for the consumer and a good idea for the manufacturer. A widescreen with equal diagonal measurement to a 4:3 screen has a smaller surface area, therefore cheaper to produce. However, since your pictures aren't widescreen there are back bars on either side of your photos unless you spend some time cropping and/or skewing each one of your photos. So, the actual viewing area is pretty close to 7". However, the picture is shown the same size as if you had a 4:3 screen at about 5 3/4".
Imagine my disappointment then to have my frame show up (very quickly) and when I pull it out of the box... it's widescreen. Although I wish this were more apparent in the product description I guess I should have been more skeptical before I bought the thing.
Other than the widescreen thing it's fairly straight forward to use. The built-in auto resize isn't super awesome. You'll probably want to resize and crop everything in photoshop or gimp before you put them on there (lots of fun if you're into that sort of thing).
Bottom line: It's pretty much a 5 3/4" screen, not 7"...
 Excellent Frame - 8" Non-wireless Version December 4, 2008
22 out of 25 found this review helpful
The 8" versions are the only ones with a 4:3 aspect ratio. This is the ideal and native ratio for 99+% of digital cameras. Only very few take photos in 16:9 widescreen, and taking the time to convert and crop your 4:3 photos into 16:9 would no doubt be tedious. Generally the 16:9 models are more expensive but LESS expensive for manufacturers to make because may other consumer electronic devices require 7-10" widescreen/16:9 LCDs while not many use 4:3 anymore. Don't be fooled by the 16:9 unless you know for sure you need it!
The resolution is a very sharp 800x600, and the contrast ratio is a very respectable 400:1. I researched several different brands and models before finding this great frame. It has a nice smooth exterior case that doesn't look cheap, isn't too flimsy and isn't too thick.
The images are nice and sharp, and like I said before, the native 4:3 resolution is a plus. It has 1GB of memory built-in, which is enough for plenty of pictures, but it is also expandable via a multitude of flash card slots. SD is extremely cheap, and Amazon sells a 16GB one for about $25-30 (probably way more than most need :))
File transfers are easy, and like another reviewer said, the frame works equally well on Windows and Mac machines. I'm not sure about Linux, but I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard.
My ideal frame would be thinner, higher resolution and contrast ratio, and larger diagonal screen size for less money... but that is not likely to happen for another few years. However, at the price, this is one of the best, if not the best, digital photo frame you can buy
Decent 7" LCD frame for the money, but beware 16:9 (widescreen) December 5, 2008
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
Note this review is for the 7" Samsung non-wireless frame only.
I bought this 7" digital picture frame unknowing it is NOT 4:3... it's 16:9 (aka widescreen), because of unclear product descriptions by Amazon and a little bit of inexperience / naivete regarding this particular model.
So unless all your pics are 4:3 (NOT likely in the least) then you will have black bars on both sides of the photo when displayed using the default option (see below for further explanation). That is one downside, in my opinion, with dealing with this frame. Otherwise I liked it very much, high quality, good features, internal memory is adequate, and it was fairly easy to use, with the exception of the buttons on the back. Several others have the buttons on the front which makes perfect sense (why put them on the back where you can't see, when you have to read at the menu on the screen itself?). In fact, it's pretty awful. I have gotten quite good at using it, but since accessing the menus at times is a bit non-intuitive. For some people this will be frustrating, no doubt.
FYI you can only use AC power, and there's no internal battery to charge, or slot for AA's, which is a bit annoying since we can't put it on the coffee table in the middle of the room. This frame only uses USB or SD, so if you have your photos on another kind (Sony Memory Stick, xD, etc) you're out of luck. If you have micro or miniSD you must use an adapter (not included) to insert it into the slot. If you don't have this kind, and you're very lucky you may be able to find some adapter that makes it think it's USB or SD. However I wouldn't bet money on it.
Copying images to the frame is not too difficult, and most of the menu options are easy to understand, and provide a good deal of flexibility with using the frame. Using the different options (original size, fit to width, or stretch) you can manipulate the pictures to look the way that you want. Note original size is the default, but I prefer fit to width, that gets rid of the black bars but obscures just a bit of the top & bottom of photos. The only option better than the built in ones to make them fit is to crop them yourself, which most people won't want to do. There is also a rotate feature for manipulating vertical pictures into the correct position, since the frame won't automatically rotate them. Unless you're using "original size" (which shows them rightside up, but tiny), forget about seeing them at all. Still, you'll need to view these vertical pics separately from the horizontal ones unless you like turning your head on your side every few pictures. Again, the only other reasonable option is to crop them on your PC.
One more thing, the user manual is completely useless except for basically telling you how to plug it in, turn it on, and push the buttons. My jaw literally dropped, since I've had other Samsung products which explained every nuance of the product in great detail. The Kodak 7" frame I compared it to had much better instructions.
Origin: Made in China - though better quality than 90% out there
Warranty: average
Update: I ended up BUY-ing a Philips 5.6-inch LCD Black Digital Photo Frame model 6FF3FPB (black), also available as 6FF3FPW (white) instead, which was half the price and had the 4:3 aspect ratio. I wish I had found this one on Amazon in the first place, then I wouldn't have gone to all this trouble
 Wireless features aren't well baked, UI is sluggish. December 9, 2008
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
What this frame does well is the basics of getting photos from an SD card or internal memory, and displaying the slideshow. The picture is very clear and colors are bright. No issues there. The problem is that they've sacrificed internal memory (a mere 64MB) so that more of the cost of the device could be dedicated to the wireless features - which is where this product is unfortunately NOT all that well baked.
I tried a variety of different supported methods for having this frame read photos over the network with relatively unsatisfactory results:
1) Reading photos from an MSN Spaces account's RSS feed. This appears to have been broken with a recent change to the Live services, and while the photo albums are visible, the frame doesn't find any photos within the album.
2) Getting photos from a Windows Media Player NSS sharing library. While this worked, the frame was extremely slow to locate computers on the network and even slower to enumerate the photos available on those computers. This made starting a slideshow an excruciating experience.
3) Framechannel - create an account and upload your own pics or link it to your Myspace account, as well as local weather, stocks, and so forth. This actually seems to work reasonably well. However, occasionally the frame would inexplicably lock up trying to retrieve the channel information and would only respond to a hard reboot.
In all cases, the UI can take an unacceptably long time to respond to button presses, with no on-screen indication that the button press was noticed. And the buttons themselves are flat-membrane points on the bezel, which can be a bit oversensitive (or undersensitive) with no tactile feedback.
During one bootup I actually got a Windows application crash dialog and the device needed to be power cycled. That's just downright embarrassing.
All in all, I think you can probably find frames for a similar price with better UI responsiveness and where the added dollars will go to better use, such as additional onboard memory, rather than spending it on some rather poorly baked wireless networking features.
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