Philips 9-Inch Digital Picture Frame (Metal) by Philips Consumer Electronics
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Digital camera reviews of Philips 9-Inch Digital Picture Frame (Metal)
Digital camera Review: Good gift idea, needs time to figure out
Summary: 3 Stars
The first impression was -- it's heavier than i thought. Frame itself is sleek, display area big and nice, picture quality is good, and the slide show function works great. Connection to my PC works well, no software needed (I am running windows XP). Great gift for grandparents to admire a lot baby pictures at a time with no fuss.
Downside: the buttons on its back are not easy to handle, manual is very basic. The way display albums arrangement is a bit confusing, and when picture size is bigger (than 800K?) it's slow to display, takes up to 5 seconds more to show. Also, the plug position is poorly designed so when plugged in (USB and power cords) it's not easy to stand still itself.
Digital camera Review: Good product but bad photo software
Summary: 3 Stars
I spend about 3-hrs trying to figure out the flawed software. It has problems transferring pictures to a SD card. The software kept hanging, when I tried to copy more than five pictures from my PC. It also crashed my new windows Vista for the first time in 3-months. As such, it seems to be a good product. Wish they had a good photo transfer software and bigger internal memory.
Update July05, 2008: I have found a way to work around the flawed Philips software and its interaction with a SD card.
Step(1): Move your pictures, 50-80 at a time, to the internal memory of the photo frame.
Step(2): Now using the "move" function in photo frame, move the pictures from internal memory to the SD card. Step(3): Repeat #1 and #2, for all your pictures. Phoof! This works like a charm.
If you are having problems transferring to your photo frames SD card, this will help.
Digital camera Review: Good product but...
Summary: 4 Stars
The frame works well but does have an odd stand with only two positions. This causes the frame to stand too vertical! Also would like to see the unit come with a remote. The software that comes with the unit for the PC is not very good.Digital camera Review: Good to look at, horrible to operate
Summary: 1 Stars
I chose this frame over its competitors mainly because of Philips brand recognition, and because it looked the best among all offerings. The frame basically works out of the box, and if you don't touch it, you can have nice, smooth slideshows that you'll enjoy. The best mode of operation I found on it was just plugging in a CF card straight from a camera. And honestly, it does look great as a frame I'd put on a coffee table somewhere, compared to its clunky competitors.
Unfortunately, the operative words are "don't touch"!
However, these frames are meant for people who are not tech savvy, and they are meant to be updated with new pictures frequently. The Philips 8' frame failed completely on both accounts, making this purchase one of the worst electronics shopping experiences of my electronics shopping career!
First of all, it doesn't like all JPEGs, it only likes some JPEGs. If you have photos that Adobe Photoshop has even looked at (with standards compliant updates of metadata, for instance) the frame goes crazy and shows giant X marks where the photo should be, taking several seconds to show even the X mark during preview. Everyone else shows the photos (web browsers, the MS picture viewer, photoshop, cameras) but the frame just refuses. For such photos, you have to slog through their own software to have them resized and metadata-sanitized, which works less than half of the time (see below).
Second of all, the user interface on the frame, though not entirely unreasonable, is completely incompatible with the notion of having LOTS of photos in it. Basically, if you're in thumbnail mode looking at photo #500 out of #1000, you have to page through all 500 photos before the one you're looking at, before you'll be allowed to exit the browsing menu. Especially if you're unlucky enough to have presented the frame with 500 of the JEPG files it doesn't like (taking several seconds to show each X thumbnail), getting out of the menu can take up your entire day. Who came up with that brilliant idea?
As others have already said, the PC software for managing photos on the frame is an absolutely unacceptable piece of trash. It doesn't work if you drag and drop photos too fast, it doesn't work with all flash cards (it doesn't like SD cards very much, especially those used with Canon cameras, whereas it's OK with CF cards as far as I can tell), it spends entire days trying to come up with the thumbnails of photos you want to move into the frame (even though MS Windows already has the thumbnails precomputed in the directories already). Furthermore, it keeps failing in interesting yet inexplicable ways, such as claiming you do not have enough space on the storage device, even when you have 80% free on the on-board storage. Forget about removing photos via the software; you'll just regret it. Certainly, don't expect to mix and match photos, manage albums, move in photos from a PC, consolidate photo stores, etc.
To top it all off, on day 3 of its use, one of the two frames I purchased just stopped working. The on/off button was on, but nothing was going on on the screen; no brigthness adjustment, no on/off switching, no resetting with the paperclip got it to relent and start showing something, anything, ever again.
The Philips support was offensive and unbelievably incompetent. After waiting for 45 minutes (I am not exaggerating folks), I got a person who basically recited the pitiful FAQ on the Philips web site for me. There was no way to speak to a technical person to escalate. Instead, I was asked to return their broken frame to them, at my own expense, and wait for 8-13 weeks for a replacement. Are these guys for real? Seriously.
I've owned many Philips devices over the years. It hasn't always been a beautiful experience, but overall I have had no reason to hate Philips before. This frame really changed my view of the entire company. Basically, I will never buy another Philips component again, unless my life depends on it (perhaps not even then...)
Digital camera Review: Great Digital Frame
Summary: 5 Stars
This frame is of superior quality construction. It is made of real metal, not just a plastic with a metalic finish. The resolution quality is very high. I purchased another brand frame and returned it due to the low picture quality once I owned this one. The only feature I would like Philips to add would be a motion detection option. Great product!