Philips 9-Inch Digital Picture Frame (Metal)
by Philips Consumer Electronics
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List Price: Category: Digital Camera See more product details |
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Customers in the UK,
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for British Pounds
Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Philips 9-Inch Digital Picture Frame (Metal)
Customer Review: Perfect gift
Summary: 5 Stars
I imported my twins photos to the frame and gave it to my mother-in-law on Mother's Day. She loved the gift.Customer Review: This is a great product.
Summary: 5 Stars
No need to say much more than that this is a great product.Customer Review: Philips 9-Inch Digital Picture Frame (Metal)
Summary: 4 Stars
Firstly, I've owned this product for 1 month now, and this product has been running for 1 month now without my touching it. So rest assured that this isn't your overnight overly excited review.
----> Pros:
1) The physical construction of the frame is beautiful, sturdy and solid. You will find no creeks on this frame, and the metal-frame itself is a real eye-candy, if you're into that sort of the whole futuristic white-metal look.
2) The screen is very good, as others have pointed out. It's not as great as a HDTV screen, but it's definitely good enough to give the impression under broad daylight that it actually is a frame holding a picture.
3) I actually found the use of the user interface (UI) to be particularly simple. I believe as long as you keep your mind open and not try to compare the UI to anything, you will quickly find out how easy it is to navigate through the menus.
4) (MINOR) I consider it to be an upside when Im not forced to have to use the supplied program that came with the frame. When it comes to tech-stuff, I like to do things the manual way, so I'm not sure about you.
----> Cons:
1) (MINOR) The build of the buttons and joystick could have been a little better. There are minor annoyances when navigating throughout the UI. For example, if you're moving the stick left, it records as a push down on the stick instead. This is also due in part to the fact that the joystick is at the back and you cannot properly coordinate your joystick-push actions. It's really minor, nothing to get upset about, take my word for it.
2) In a month of use, under certain SD cards, the slideshow would stop working. The SD card would not be read in the slot (SD card was a 1 GB Sandisk). I had to physically restart the product in order to get it going again, only to have this happen again after 20 ~ 30 hours of running? However, after changing into a 2GB Micro SD with the SD adapter (Made in Japan model), the frame has been running flawlessly for a month without problems, at all.
3) (MINOR) Perhaps more internal memory could have been supplied? But I'm guessing if that were the case, the price of this product would have gone up further. I put this here because it may be an annoyance for some. It is not for me though.
4) (MINOR) The turning leg-support at the back that allowed you to switch between landscape/portrait could have been designed with more angle flexibility in mind. Again, I put this here for those who are concerned. I do not find any problem with the way it is now.
Having said that, I'd like to express my tips and tricks in knowing how to effectively use this product to its maximum potential.
1) If you plan to have a lot of pictures without placing them in folders (Just the root of the card), format your card in FAT32. If not, you may not get past 250 pictures or so.
2) DO NOT USE THE SUPPLIED PROGRAM. Simply copy your photos into the SD cards or whatever it is you're using and you're good to go.
3) If you want to edit pictures, do it on your computer. Don't toy around with the pictures through the frame.
4) Don't bother with the USB cable.
5) Use Irfanview to mass-convert photos into the frame's natural resolution (720x540).
My setup:
- No folders have been used. All pictures are stored in the root position of my SD card.
- It is set to turn on for 8 hours a day, and 12 hours during the weekends.
- Running time : a month of going without having to adjust it for whatever reason.
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I hope this has provided you with some sense of how this product is. Just remember, don't use the supplied program and you will be much happier with it. I understand that the CONS are longer than the PROS, but they're mostly just thoughts on how the thing could be improved upon for future versions. For myself, I absolutely love this product.
Cheers.
Customer Review: Be patient if you have problems
Summary: 4 Stars
I've had this frame for 2 days now. I looked at lots of options & read the reviews here before choosing this one. Previously I had a Vista frame; the reason I was looking for something else is that the Vista apparently can only handle up to 500 pictures, even if your memory card holds more & the motion sensor wasn't working right any more.
I love this frame, for all the reasons that others have already mentioned here. However, the documentation is terrible & very confusing. I have an SD card with about 500 pictures that I used in my other frame. In spite of numerous tries, I could not get the frame to recognize these pictures. It listed the SD card, but none of the pictures would show up in the menu. One of the other reviewers here was very helpful & suggested reformatting the card when I asked him for help, but that didn't work. I tried some other SD cards & got the same result... the SD card was listed, but there were no pictures to choose for the slideshow.
What did work for me was to use a Compact Flash card instead of an SD card. I think another review mentioned doing that. I reformatted the CF card before ever putting it in the frame (it had been in my digital camera). I copied the same 500 pictures to the CF card and it worked right away when I put it in the frame. When you put the card in the frame the option for "PC Folder" needs to be darkened - it was always grayed out with the SD cards. All my memory cards are the same brand (Lexar) - whether that's a factor or not I can't say at this point.
Even though my pictures from the Vista frame were all sized with a 4:3 aspect, most of them look fine with the 3:2 aspect of this frame. I will have to tweak some of them, but it's much better than I expected.
I love the quality of the display with this frame, as well as the variety of options for transitions between pictures, etc. The documentation could be a lot clearer, though. Once you have it working it's simple, but getting there can be frustrating.
Customer Review: 4.5 Stars - High quality display with a few quirks
Summary: 4 Stars
As many other reviewers have indicated, the quality of this frame is extremely high in terms of the material, build, and photo quality. The menu system is good but not great; I'd call it serviceable.
I noticed a couple quirks while setting up this frame (Note: my settings: 1GB SD card, all photos are in 1024x768 with no resizing; if you wish to maximize space usage, you can use a freeware Irfanview and batch convert to 720x540. I tried it and it works well, but adds an extra step to the process).
I first created various albums using the menu system. Then I connected it to the PC via USB, copied the pictures into the SD card, and all files are present within the various albums. However, the frame simply does not see some of the photos. The frame for some reason does NOT display all my JPEGs, even though all of them were taken from the same digital camera using identical settings. I made multiple attempts with no luck, and the problem appears to be random. Tech support had little to offer. After several attempts, I had no choice but to conclude this is a bug in the internal software of the frame.
After consulting an Amazon'com friend, I decided to copy all photos to the root (base) directory of the SD card instead of using multiple albums. This worked, as all photos were recognized and displayed by the frame. The only drawback with this method is that all pics are lumped into a single folder ("PC Folder") on the frame, and you cannot display a subset of your photos at a given time (using albums) which I wanted to do. I decided I was willing to forgo this option and just let it display all photos using a random setting.
In summary, I highly recommend this frame to anyone who is looking for an elegant digital frame that looks great. I advise against installing the software, but instead, use USB to drop the files directly to the frame's internal memory, or an SD card.