Kodak EX-811 Easyshare 8-inch Digital Picture Frame with Wireless Capability by Kodak
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Digital camera reviews of Kodak EX-811 Easyshare 8-inch Digital Picture Frame with Wireless Capability
Digital camera Review: Great Product!
Summary: 5 Stars
I recently bought this frame after returning a cheaper lower quality one to Walmart ... it was a gift to my recently married nephew ... I put wedding photos and also some of their wedding songs on the frame and gave it to them for Christmas ... it came out awesome ... the pictures display great and the music is pretty good for a picture frame (don't expect awesome sound, it is a PICTURE frame after all), but I really can't complain ... I learned a trick also ... I had the songs in order of how I wanted them to play, but the picture frame plays them in alphabetical order ... so you just need to go back onto the memory card and sequence them by putting A,B,C, etc as the first letter for the song files ... can't rate the wireless capability yet, but this is a great frame!Digital camera Review: Great except the wirlees is worthless
Summary: 2 Stars
Summary: Great product if the wirless was reliable.
Pros:
Bright screen with good resolution.
Good off axis viewing.
Great feature set.
128MB internal memory
Card reader handles a lot of card formats
Cons:
Wireless can't stay connected for 24 hours even when close to access point.
Eashyshare software is poor
Loading photos is painfully slow
App will sit in the background chewing up CPU cycles doing nothing
Wide frame aspect ratio can be frustrating when dealing with portrait shots
Customer support is poor
Details:
I spent weeks trying to make this work. The Kodak Easyshare web site wouldn't stay connected more than a few hours. I changed from a 5 second picture rotation to 15 minutes thinking bandwidth might be a problem. I then tried using a directory off of my laptop. That would crash the frame in the same way i.e. to the top menu. After the frame crashed to the top menu the only way to get the wireless connection back was to power cycle the frame. Otherwise you would drill down to the photo directory and select a slide show only to be bounced back to the home (top) menu. I then tried my desktop. I then though Vista might be a problem so I tried another desktop running XP Pro. I never got the frame to keep displaying the photos over the wireless link for an entire day.
Throughout all of this I tried several other things. Photos were sized down so they weren't too large in case that was a problem. The frame was tried in two locations. One had direct line of sight to the wireless antenna. Both locations were 10' to 15' away from the wireless antenna with no obstructions. Troublesome photos were removed. As another reviewer commented, this frame dislikes photos that work fine when viewed on my computers. I even tried using 2 different routers and made sure QOS was turned off.
This was an anniversary gift to my wife and she loved the frame except for the crashing. That is why I tried so hard to make it work. Competing frames are either too big or low in resolution so I will have to wait for someone to bring out one that fits our needs.
Digital camera Review: Great frame, horrible Wi-Fi approach - beware
Summary: 3 Stars
This review is appropriate for people who were thinking the Wi-Fi would be great for people who store lots of photos on computer and would love ability to automatically access new photos added periodically, without having to do physical transfers via mem stick etc etc.
I bought this for my parents for christmas, thinking i'd also buy one for myself later. I picked this over other frames because it came with some internal memory (watch out, many of those other cheaper frames have NO internal memory, so you end up having to buy a memory card anyway, making it not so cheap after all.) Also bought this because of its media options (taking different memory card formats) and because of positive reviews from other people re: photo resolution (I had seen comments that cheaper frames had worse and sometimes weird picture resolutions). This seemed like a flexible and safe bet. Turns out I didn't read deeply enough about the wi-fi option and how it works.
Bottom line, i paid extra for an option that does not work in a practical way. I should have just bought the SV model (no wi-fi) and then I would have been 95% satisfied. As it is, I'm 50% satisfied. No one should have released a product touting wi-fi with as many problems as I experienced. The only reason I'm not saying less than 50% is that at least the rest of the frame worked very well.
I'll summarize pros and cons briefly then go into the wi-fi con for those who care.
PROS:
- Came right up out of the box and played pictures in a card or USB stick attached.
- Great looking pictures. I loaded pics I had just scanned and pics that were straight from different digital cameras. No conversions required. Just rotated some before I loaded then so all would be right side up.
- Menu easy to navigate and understand for me using the little remote control. A little less intuitive for my Dad (70 yrs old, decently computer literate, just not as confident as me), but he got it OK. Nice to be able to stick his memory card in and copy from card to frame if he wanted.
CONS:
- Frame requires XP SP2 and windows Media Player 11. Former should be no big deal, everyone should have upgraded to that years ago- but beware if buying this for the grandparents. Midnight on christmas eve, everyone has finally gone to bed, and I sit down on my dad's computer to install the software and get this thing ready loaded with pics and talking to his network before I wrap up the gift. Big mistake. Hours later I'm still doing upgrades to his computer, because he had never done SP2 for XP.
SECOND part of this problem - The frame's software requires Windows Media Player 11. OMG what an evil piece of software. I installed it; actually got the wi-fi between frame and computer working quickly and started sharing pics with the frame. THEN - I wondered why my dad's computer suddenly couldn't do ANYTHING else. CPU totally taken over by WMP related files. Finally brought up my computer (because his was so taken over after a few minutes that i couldn't even get to the web to look anything up), and found tirades online about how WMP 11 in media sharing mode sucks the CPU down when talking to things like Xboxes. Long story short, on Christmas Day I showed him the wifi sharing, then turned off the sharing mode, turned off WMP 11 and apologized and told him I'd try to find a way to make it work as soon as I could. I basically blew at least $30 because the wi-fi mode of this frame is unusable.
I'm now at home doing research online trying to figure out if there's some WMP 11 fix I don't know about yet to get around this problem. How can Microsoft put a product like this out? or is it the fact that my Dad's computer's memory (256MB) just won't handle it even though he's got XP Professional loaded? (I'm going to try this media sharing on computers with 512 MB and 2 GB and see what happens and will update this review if I find antying out... but I have not been able to find ANY help online so far saying "if you just get this much memory the problem goes away.)"
Anyway, I wanted to post this review for any other folks considering this frame for grandparents who routinely use their computer for pictures. Becuase this family did NOT find a way to make it work. (and if someone out there wants to respond and tell me where I'm being stupid, I am ALL ears... this was a very frustrating experience).
- Other major problem, Easy Share software stinks, at least for me. Tried installing this on 2 different computers, had trouble both times. Installed on my dad's computer, older, but then kept locking up. I had to reboot his computer to even get the program to shut down. Wouldn't even install on mine (the one I use and abuse at work for all kinds of programs - so no reason it shouldn't install.) It first goes out to validate that you've got a legit version of Windows- which I do.... but I couldn't even get past that step on my computer. I finally un-installed it so my dad's comptuer would stop locking up. So there goes the ability to log into an online gallery account and download family pics, another reason I got this model of the frame.
Bottom line again, the frame is great except for the way the wi-fi shares pictures with the computer - more Microsofts problem than Kodaks, but I would have expected them to test this better and know that in practical setup, it is NOT USABLE! or issue better computer system requirements instructions. I I buy one for myself, it will be the SV version, no wi-fi, unless I can find some something online about how to get around these wi-fi shortfalls.
Digital camera Review: Great picture quality, but you may get "current file is bad" on picture frame
Summary: 4 Stars
The picture quality is probably one of the best I've seen but......
There's only one problem that I have had with the Kodak SV 811. If your files are too large, i.e. 3MB+ photos you may receive the following error message "Current file is bad" on the picture frame. To resolve this problem do the following and it will correct the problem: resize your photos to 1600 X 1200 dpi(landscape mode), (1200X 1600 for portrait mode) and the frame will work fine.....Plus you'll be able to store over 300+ photos in the internal memory.
P.S. Edit the photos in a program like Adobe Photoshop (resize the images in Adobe to 1600X1200 dpi) and then reload the resized images back into the Kodak digital picture frame. I resized all my photos in the Kodak digital picture frame to 1600 X 1200 dpi and there are no more "bad files." And the quality of the photos is still very good....
Digital camera Review: Great product!!!
Summary: 4 Stars
Great product! Excellent picture quality! Many nice features! However, the quality of pictures pulled over wifi from the Kodak Gallery is something to be desired. This is a result of settings on Kodak Gallery, not the frame. I don't regret the purchase, but did anticipate equal picture quality from all sources.