Pandigital 8.0" Digital Photo Frame

Price: 129.95 - 129.95

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Excellent quality & correct aspect ratio1198184004

Pros:

Very clear picture & bright quality, great at displaying 800x600 photos, very bright and good view angles

Cons:

Picture transition lags a bit, makes a whine noise if the brightness is turned down too low, short frame stand so the picture is at a bad viewing angle

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.