Electronics: Pandigital 8.0" Digital Photo Frame

I am thrilled with this digital picture frame. I bought it from a brick & mortar CompUSA for $180. I had done a lot of homework and research online on these things prior to finally seeing this one on display in the store. I was amazed at the high resolution and brightness. This screen has 640x480 resolution which is high for an 8" screen. It's roughly the equivelant of my 19" monitor at 1280x1024 (dpi is about the same). I'm using the 64MB of onboard memory for my pictures. To get pics on the frame, I first created a new folder on my PC specifically for my favorite pics. Then I went through all of my pictures and copied my favorite ones to the folder. Then I resized them all to the native screen res of 640x480. Resizing them to the screen's native resolution will make them look their best and help you save room on your memory card. I used a program called Fuji FinePixViewer which came free with a Fuji digital camera (you might be able to download it for free). The program allowed me to "batch resize" the pics so I could resize them all at once which made it easy. Then I plugged the frame in, hooked it up to my PC w/ the included USB cable and copied all of my pics from the folder that I had created over to the frame. (For me, the frame came up as "Removable Disk (L:)". The last drive letter in the list is the onboard memory. The only downside of the onboard memory is that I think it has a maximum number pics that it can hold regardless of whether it has room for more or not. I was able to copy exactly 150 pics over to the onboard memory before it could no longer write a directory for more. I haven't tried playing video or music on it yet. A couple things to be aware of is that when you take it out of the box and first turn it on, make sure that the brightness dial on the back is turned up. Mine was turned all the way down leading me to think that I had a dead product. Also, the stand on the rear of the frame is adjustable. It can be pulled out and made longer to raise the frame higher. Also, it looks like the little remote would slide into the frame somehow but I couldn't get it to fit anywhere and if you loose it, you'll be screwed. You absolutley NEED the remote to properly use the frame. I might buy some velcro sticker things to attach the remote to the back of the frame. Hide Full Review

The frame can be tricky to get it to do what you want it to. However, the fact that the pictures are so clear and vibrant far outweighs the time it takes to operate it. The slideshow also eliminates the need for one hundred different frames. Great product. Hide Full Review

I have 2 of these at home and just bought one for my mom to use and put pictures of her trips and grand kids on it. The main thing that caught my attention was the 800x600 picture size and aspect ratio for viewing. Just about all of the other 7"-9" frames I looked at were not a standard 800x600 (or 640x480) aspect ratio, but rather a very long and wide screen look. That means that your pictures would either be scrunched up or cut off on the top & bottom. With this frame, on most cameras that shoot in a regular format, you don't need to resize anything except for the image/file size itself for your memory stick. For the most part, I use a newer Canon Powershot for my pictures and no image cropping is needed. But at least your entire picture fills the frame and the brightness is very good and makes a dark room light up.




A couple of things that I didn't like was the lag time when pictures would transition (shuffle) to the next picture. I wasn't as smooth as some of the others I've seen but it's not bad either. That really doesn't make or break it for me and the picture quality makes me ignore that fault. Also the other main thing I didn't like is the stand on the back is very short. Therefore when you have the frame standing up, it's at such an angle that you need to look down on it to see the image in a straight view. I had to put a 3" block behind the frame to prop the stand up higher. It's hidden behind the frame and you don't see it, and the frame sits now at a perfect viewing angle on my shelf, but it was a disappointment that the stand wasn't originally longer.




A couple of times, I might notice a high pitch noise coming from the frame. The dial on the back that allows you to quickly manually adjust the brightness of the picture would correct the problem. If I had the picture a little too dark (had the dial turned down too far), I'd hear a high pitch whine from the frame... very faint but noticable if an absolute quiet room. I'd have to turn the dial up to get rid of the whine, but when just go into the menu and turn down the brightness electronically and you're all set. Like somebody else said, don't lose the remote because you can't get into the setup without it.





One thing I noticed is that you need to save your JPG images as Standard images, and not in CYMK or Progressive format. The frame will not understand this format and will not read the pictures. It took me awhile to figure this out when I copied images directly to it and onto a SD card and even an Compact flash card. Once I figured that out, I loaded up lots of pictures to my SD card and enjoy them as they rotate to my album. I just wish you could fine-tune, or at least have more options for the picture-rotation timer where as 10 seconds is too fast but 30 seconds is sometimes too slow for me.




As for the price, I don't think this was too expensive (after a 15% coupon, it was $120 from Circuit City), but compared to other 8" frames it costs more. But the difference in quality is very noticable. With digital picture frames, the saying "you get what you pay for" applies here as I've cheaped out before getting the PanDigital frame and the picture quality, colors, and resolution was very distorted and bad looking.




I haven't used the MP3 audio or the MPG video option yet on the picture frames. I really don't intend to as I really wanted a good digital still picture frame that made my pictures look good.




Overall, I'm very satisfied with this particular frame. If the 10" version every drops down in price drastically, I'll look into that. Hide Full Review

I absolutely love this frame. I have been looking for a good digital frame for months and months, and this one is perfect!

The wood frame is very nice and the resolution is outstanding. I have yet to find a digital picture fram that I like better than this. Hide Full Review