Photo Digital Frame

Review by PT Cruiser:

Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/RDAW90063I6JX This is a good little photo frame for this price range. It has lots of features and the menus are easy to maneuver. Once you’ve set the brightness and contrast settings the pictures look pretty good. We enjoy using the frame. It’s a good size for using on a desk.

I know a video review isn’t ideal since the resolution gets changed when uploading to this website, and just taking a picture of something that is lighted like this leaves something to be desired, but I wanted to give everyone some idea of the features. The photos actually look better in person for some reason. I think it’s like taking a photo of a TV screen, it never looks as good. For example, the menus aren’t really readable on the video but they’re easy to read in person.

I hope this helps you in making a decision on this frame.

Review by CFH:

The Coby “DP702 7-Inch Widescreen Digital Photo Frame” is not a high-end multi-media device, and nor is it priced like one. This frame is a low cost, but feature rich device that gives you a lot functionality for very little money. It is, in fact, a real bargain!

Here are my observations:

Pros -

* Acceptable picture quality – FOR THE PRICE

* The wood grain frame is attractive

* Included Remote Control

* Accepts a wide variety of memory cards (SD, MMC, MS, xD, and CF card slots, as well as USB for flash memory drives)

* Plays pictures in Slide Show, Audio Files, and Videos

* Slide show starts automatically if no buttons are pressed when the device is powered on

* Sound is decent through built in speakers

Cons -

* Menu is a little difficult to navigate

* Not really practical to hang on a wall due to the power cord

* No internal memory (but memory cards are cheap, see SanDisk 1 GB Secure Digital SD Card (SDSDB-1024, Bulk Package) for example)

So, this INEXPENSIVE frame is not perfect and has somewhat marginal picture quality, but I truly think that this one of the rare cases where you get more than you pay for. There are better frames available, but you will certainly pay more for them as well.

Recommended, but only if you understand that you are buying a value priced device with some limitations.

Review by Timothy Oey:

The Pandigital PAN7000DW 7″ digital photo frame is the best digital photo frame I’ve found yet. I’ve purchased 4 other models in different sizes from Axion, Phillps, Smartparts, and Opteka. All of these others had various issues (16×9 when I wanted 4×3, didn’t always start picture show automatically, buggy software).

The PAN7000DW is reasonably priced (about from Amazon as of 11/9/2009) as compared to the Sony models which are all much more expensive.

The PAN7000DW display is excellent — showing 800×600 pictures crisply and vividly. The software is very good with a reasonable user interface and useful options. I like displaying my photos using their original dimensions (the optimized view attempts to maximize the amount of display used but will chop off edges to accomplish this) – you can pick the view mode you want.

The frame accurately shows the EXIF photo date/time if you want to display it. It will also optionally show the current time. It has a nice calendar w/ picture view as well as the normal full frame photo view. And it seems to show ALL your photos eventually (I had a strange problem with an Opteka frame not showing all the photos, only a subset). The remote is small and is held on the back of the frame by a magnet. The remote works well (some remotes I’ve used have buttons that are hard to press or control). The menu structure (frame software) is logical and well arranged.

The clock functionality and auto turn on/off functionality is useful if you have power available to your frame at all times. However, I’ve hooked my frame up to a motion sensing power strip in my office and the time/date gets whacked when the sensor shuts off for the weekend (the time/date seem to survive for a few minutes or hours without power but not over a weekend). So if you use your frame with a motion sensing powerstrip, forget using the clock/calendar feature.

As I’ve discovered with many photo frames, if you want to display pictures in a particular order, they must exist in flash memory written down in that order – this is not a visible ordering – it does not depend on file name or file creation time. If you start with a totally empty flash card (or internal frame memory) then it will be the order in which the files are copied to the memory device. Macintosh and Windows file copy routines are the fastest way to copy files but the order in which copying takes place is not under your control if you move a large number of files all at the same time – the operating system parallelizes the copying for speed but this places the pictures in different physical memory order. It is too bad that most photo frames do not allow you to display in creation date order or EXIF date order or even file name order.

The best way to lay down the photos in sequence is to start with an empty flash device. Then copy the files either one by one by hand or using an automated method that copies files only one at a time. A cmd file on Windows that can do this is like:

——-

dir /b /od>c:\junk.txt

for /f “delims=*” %%i in (c:\junk.txt) do copy “%%i” f:\

——-

[...] (you need to change this script to fit your exact situation)

Alternatively you can use Photoshop Elements or some other photo management tool to export photos in sequence directly to a memory card or your picture frame.

Hopefully future photo frames will become a bit more intelligent and allow you to pick your display order.

Overall I’ve found the PAN7000DW to be a good value and to work as you would expect.

Review by R. Lin:

I bought the Pandigital PAN7000DW so that I could load it up with pictures and videos of my new son and send it to my grandmother. After a few hours dealing with it (I’m very experienced with computers and electronic gadgets), here’s my take:

- I like the look of the frame (classic looking) and the screen is bright and crisp.

- I could not get any video files to work. The documentation says it plays motion jpeg AVIs, and I tried many conversion options on my Mac using MPEG Streamclip and could not get it to work.

- Navigating the menus is a pain using the built-in buttons, so at first glance you’re glad they included a remote…except the remote only registers about every 3rd button click, so you’re constantly over clicking.

- The UI is pretty slow and lags your button presses.

All that said, it’ll do what I want it to do. I’ve loaded it with 223 pictures at 1280×720 resolution, and it only takes up 34MB of the 1GB internal memory.

Review by P. Dunegan:

I’ve been wanting a digital photo frame for ages, and the prices haven’t come down all that much. I liked the price and reviews on this one, so ordered two … one for me and one for my daughter and her family. It just came today (super-fast shipping), and I am so pleased. Finally, an electronic gadget that’s like a toaster … you just plug it in and it works!! No software to load, no gizmos to fiddle with, I just put in my usb flash drive with pics on it and plugged it in, and it worked right out of the box. Yippee!

Review by TAM:

I would highly recommend this frame, to many (but not all) people.

If you want a simple to use frame, with absolutely gorgeous image quality, this is the one for you. Grandma could operate it – just a few buttons.

It’ll display from it’s memory, or from a USB stick or card (and probably other things I haven’t used). With a couple buttons, you can copy the images from the USB etc. to the memory.

It shows pictures in order by date modified, or random. If you just load pics from the camera card, this will be perfect.

If you edit images, you have to find some software to fix (reset) the date modified, if you want the photos in order. There is a lot of freeware to do this. Alternatively, you can download Kodak’s free software to create slideshows – it sets the date to today, and then increments the time. This works great for an individual slideshow – but not so good for adding things to the frame.

But, if you just add new pictures as you shoot them, they’ll stay in order.

If you want a bunch of fancy options (music, video, etc) or want to be able to scroll around on the frame and select groups of pictures, those features are not on this frame.

But personally, I’ll deal with creating slideshows on the computer, and putting them on a stick.

Did I mention, the color and photo quality is absolutely GEORGOUS?

Review by Search Alot:

I looked at several brands of digital photo frames. Every time I came back to the Sony because it stands out for picture quality, sharpness, features (lots of features), ease of operation. Even if immediately you don’t think you would use all of the features, pay the money and get it anyway. You’ll be surprised how all of a sudden one or more of those features is a neat thing to have. The internal memory is large, slideshow, individual view, and picture selection from any source is so simple you can start using most of the features right out of the box. Even the owners manual is extremely user friendly. Yes the price was a bit much but put the Sony next to the others on the market and there is no comparison for picture quality. One downside: you have to use a power cord. I found a couple of portable power sources but power plug on the Sony is not the typical power recepticle found on most products. Thanks Sony….how about making a portable source available? I would love to place the frame on a table for display without having to find a place to plug it in. I found only one brand of frame with a built in battery but the picture quality was no where near the Sony so I opted for the Sony hoping that I could find a portable power pack or hope I will always have a place to plug it in. Price is starting to come down so be patient if price is your obstacle. It is well worth the wait.

Review by Douglas R. Wieringa:

…and I’ve owned four of them.

My requirements were pretty simple — a high-quality LCD and the ability to play from a large selection of pictures, either randomly (my preference) or by shoot date (my wife’s preference). I went through three frames that choked on large numbers of pictures, had washed-out displays, and/or couldn’t play randomly or sequentially. I was surprised by how poorly conceived and tested these frames were. (Here’s a prior rant on the Digital Foci IMT-081 Image Moments Digital Photo Frame.)

But the DPF-V900 is a fine frame. It has a clean design; has a sharp, bright LCD; and has no problem with my 4300 pictures (and is good for up to 10,000, according to the manual).

Bottom line is that, while not perfect, the DPF-V900 is a real product from a real company that has done some real quality control. As far as I can tell, that’s the state of the art in the digital frame business right now.