Mom’s birthday is next week. I usually get a tech gift for her… as long as it’s not too complicated it’s cool.
I thought that the 7" digital photo frames that take a SD card and play your pictures would be cool. There’s about a million of them though. So Dopers, do you own such a frame? Is there a certain brand or feature I should look for? Mom doesn’t need the top of the line frame, but I’m looking to spend less than $100 and avoid a POS…
Any recommendations?
I bought one for my folks sight unseen. The first one had very poor image quality. My dad complained, and the store I ordered it from let him exchange it for a different model from another company, which works very well. So, my advice is to make sure you actually see the frame before you buy it. Some of them have very low resolution.
’wulff, do you recall the brand?
I’ve been thinking about one of those as well…but… is it just me (I haven’t really been paying attention) or have those things not seen a break in the price yet. Every time I see them, I keep expecting them to be $50ish and they always seem really expensive.
But I still want to get one for my parents and in laws. That way we can load it up with pics and when we stop by, quietly swap out the SD card so they have new ones. But what I really want is the wireless ones. They both have wireless routers, that way I can swap out the pics from home.
Joey B, I’ve seen them for as low as $65 and as high as $200. On the low end, one is by Digital Spectrum (go to Amazon and type it in the search engine) and the other is by Photoblitz (over at TigerDirect.com).
Yes, there’s only one way to go: Buy a Philips. I did a great deal of investigating these things before choosing one, and I found serious complaint after serious complaint against every other brand. I also had strongly negative feedback regarding other brands from people I knew.
If you can’t afford a Philips, then I would recommend not buying one at all and choosing another gift.
I amn’t agree with you. Although Philips is great, it can’t say others are bad. In fact there are some other known brand, such as Kodak, Photoblitz, Samsung, Coby, whatever. Recently I got my Samsung SPF-72H 7" Picture Frame for $100 and like it too much. It displays my photo very cool on my bedroom. I think it’s suitable as a present for mom’s birthday. Here is the deal I used, don’t miss it
http://www.dealstudio.com/viewtopic.php?t=31064
Opinions are best asked for in IMHO. Moved.
samclem GQ moderator
amn’t??? Not trying to be nitpicky I’m just not sure if you are saying to DO agree or your DON’T agree.
I got one for my birthday a few weeks ago, from my folks, with a load of pictures of me as a kid loaded onto it. Great idea, IMO, and though I’ve now loaded on pictures from my travels onto it, I still think it’s great. My wife says she wants one “in every room”!
ETA: Sorry, I missed the point of the thread. Mine is “PCLine” whatever the hell that is; made in China no doubt, and takes an SD card up to 2 gigs. It’s great anyway, though doesn’t do 16:9 right to the edges of the screen, unless you change every picture to 16:9 which is annoying as it then stretches 4:3 to 16:9, which is just dumb programming, IMO.
I got one from Sony, almost a year ago, and couldn’t make it work right. I spent several frustrating hours with it, and then called their service reps who were totally unable to help.
I’m waiting for the wireless ones to come down in price because I don’t want to deal with loading pictures onto SD cards and such. I’d love to have some software on my Mac that can manage multiple frames, just picking whatever I want from my library. I bet Apple could do a kick-ass job of this, but since a digital photo frame isn’t going to revolutionize anything beyond, well, frames, I doubt they’ll touch it.
In the age of handheld cameras being able to print 20x30" prints, these little 5x7" frames seem silly. However, all the 8x10s seem ridiculously overpriced. It doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of technology in these things, but I guess the screen is expensive. I’ll wait a year or two for the prices to come down. In the meanwhile I’ll just set my 30" and 23" monitors’ screen saver to go through my Flickr folder. 
I sent my Dad an email asking him for the model of the current frame he has (the one he likes).
I own a Westinghouse.
My kids bought it for me last Christmas, and I love it. It hangs on my office wall and every 30 seconds I get a new high quality photo. I have about 100 of them loaded (on a CF card).
The only issue might be that if you view it from too much of a side angle, the picture is too dark.
I think this one is the one my folks have: http://www.amazon.com/Ziga-8-inch-Digital-Picture-Frame/dp/B000FMTTN2
It’s gotten pretty good reviews.
I, too, have this Westinghouse. I had one of the first digital picture frames wayyy back in 2000, so I looked for one that didn’t have its problems. I’d been looking for the past 5 years and finally found one I like. Good points about this one:
[ul]
[li]The Screen: The image quality is startling impressive compared to those even just a little less expensive. The pixels are small and close together so that it looks like a printed picture, unless your nose is pretty close to the frame. The optimal viewing angle is pretty wide, too. You don’t have to stand right in front of it, right Algernon? My old one had a lot of space between pixels so it was like looking at the photo through a window screen. That is, after you were standing exactly 90 degrees in front of it, eyes exactly at the center of the screen.[/li][li]The Screen, part II: 800x600 resolution is pretty close to the dimensions of my cameras. So many frames are “wide screen,” which means you’re going to be looking at thick black bars on either side of the images unless you go in and reformat all your pictures. When I take pictures, I don’t frame the scene in the camera for long and skinny so if I were to reformat the pictures, I’d end up losing something important. [/li][li]Power Supply: The power brick is small with a long, thin flexible cord. It’s easy to set the frame where you want and not have the cord push the frame around. My old one had a cable thicker than a desktop PC cord so it usually decided exactly where the frame pointed. Don’t get me started me on that half-pound power brick, either. [/li][li]Flash RAM supported: It takes most common memory formats, including USB thumb drives, SD and MMC, Compact Flash (cheap RAM!), various Sony formats, and xD, that odd format from Olympus and Fuji. It’s hard finding things that support xD. [/li][li]Built-in Memory: It has 128Meg of RAM built-in. If you resize the pictures down to 800x600 before putting them into the frame, you should be able to get thousands (over 3000 in my informal tests resizing my 6MP dSLR images to 800x600). Plenty of space if you don’t want to devote a memory card to the the frame. I think the frame will even offer to compress the pictures. Then again, you can just hook the frame up to your computer to put the images on it. I’ve never done it, but it is yet another option.[/li][li]Mounting Options: It can be set on a flat surface in portrait or landscape orientation, mounted on a wall either way, too, and has a tripod socket. I have mine on a mini-tripod to raise it off my desk so that the junk that piles up doesn’t obscure the frame.[/li][li]Price: The 8" is a bit higher price than your budget, at least at Best Buy when I bought it 6 months ago. I think it was $150 or so. They make a smaller frame that’s got a smaller price but same outstanding image quality.[/li][/ul]
I guess you can tell I like my frame. And that I’m a LITTLE picky. I’d never thought of Westinghouse and quality display in the same sentence, but I had to stop in the store when the frame caught the corner of my eye. Regardless of which frame you get Mom, you may want to use these items in determining whether you’re getting a good one.
A side note about RAM: If you don’t want to sacrifice any “good” RAM from your camera, watch for sales or clearances on any format supported by the frame and devote it to that purpose. Right now a lot of lower capacity SD cards are on sale, so it may pay to pick up a few cheap 128M or 256M cards. Just a thought.