After returning the HP 820A4 frame, it took me a while to buy me another digital picture frame. Not that there aren't many, but none of them are deemed reliable enough. Even the Sony's have quite many negative feed backs despite their high cost and positive reviews. So I didn't want to spend too much money anyway to end up with a clunker a year down the line.
Costco had this great deal on the Pandigital 10.4" frame with 1GB internal memory, I thought I will give it a try. The coupon would reduce the price by $40 and my cost would be $99. Not bad for a 10.4" frame with 1 GB memory. This frame also had a dark brown/black frame that suited our family room. The display resolution was 800x600, which is quite good. You need a 800x600 at least for those 8". However, as I watch the pictures I see they are bright and sharp. The frame has had wireless adaptability i.e., with an adapter it could go wireless. Costco also has this great deal - you can return almost anything within 90 days for a full refund; enough time to test out a $99 product.
The frame is pretty impressive. The colors are great though I wouldn't go gaga over it. There is a brightness control knob on the side. It can take either a USB flash drive or a mini-USB one. So I could use one for the wireless adapter and the other for a secondary source.
The random transitions are among the best I have seen even among PC screen savers. The frame can also play avi files and music mp3 files - nice, but not my requirement now. I just want to view our photos sitting and biting dust for a long time. Common, we haven't even seen our wedding photos for such a long time.
The menu system is fine; I am not so annoyed as some others are. The remote is tiny. The frame doesn't immediately respond to the click, making you click once more. But, don't do that as it will result in a default action on the screen to come up.
One biggie this frame doesn't have is auto-orientation. Many frames boast this, but I haven't see one that can perfectly accomplish the task. So, I have decided to live w/o this feature.
The remote doesn't have a ON/Off button which is a second minor nuisance. However, you can turn the frame on with a switch and run a schedule so that you don't have to worry about turning on and off reaching behind the frame always.
Overall I think it is a great bang for the buck given the size and features, notwithstanding the lack of Auto-orientation and a remote power on/off switch.
How long with this frame last; I only need to find out. I had an issue (Invalid Format) using a 16GB flash drive with the frame, but overcome it as outlined here - http://asharagam.blogspot.com/2009/05/invalid-format-error-pandigital-104.html Panimage PI1002DW 10.4-Inch Digital Picture Frame (Espresso)
I bought this 10.4 frame and pandigital's pantouch 8 inch frame from costco ($99 for 10.4 inch and $80 for the 8 inch pantouch frame) to see which one I preferred. Overall the frames look nice and they both provide a good picture. However, I found the pantouch capability on the 8 inch frame to be a huge advantage --- it made it so much easier to just touch the screen to pick photos to import, move from one menu option to another---versus on the 10.4 inch frame where I had to keep clicking on the remote or one of the buttons behind the frame to scroll through features, for me that really made things cumbersome. It was like having a computer with just a keyboard and no mouse or scroll wheel.
Maybe if I had never experienced the pantouch capability I would have not had missed it, but after using it, going to the a non-touch screen frame just seemed so annoying. I bought 2 more of the 8 inch pantouch frames for both sets of grandparents, for them the touch screen was a huge convenience. It is nice to have a bigger screen, but the 8 inch is still a good size. And as I said before, the pantouch feature was the biggest selling point.
While the best of both worlds would be to get a 10.4 inch frame WITH pantouch feature, the cost would be well over a $100 and I was not looking to spend that much.
It took me some digging to find this digital frame. Most frames only permit the slideshow mode to iterate over the picture collection in seconds: ie 5s,10s,15s,30s,60s duration. For something that is mimicking a picture frame that, to me, was too often for something on a desk or nightstand. This one has both 24 hours and 1 hour options. I was looking for 24 hours, but it turns out that 1 hour is really cool.
I loaded up 300 of our pictures (very easy with no pc software. A folder mounted as soon as the usb was connected to the pc). There is an option to get a wireless usb to dump to the folders remotely. I didn't try that but the menu appears to have all the appropriate configuration of the wireless settings.
Another feature is a screen auto-shutoff for nights and optionally for weekends (ostensibly for people who have it in an office and want it off for part/all the weekend). I really like this feature as well since it's pointless to waste electrons illuminating the living room in midnight unwatched displays.
There is a auto shutoff of the screen after a configurable 2,4,8 hours of use but that was not something I needed and meant in the afternoons the screen would go blank.
Note that it's not clear whether that when it goes to "sleep" that the next photo in the morning is the randomized/next or whether the screen is off and the pictures are still progressing in the slideshow without displaying. It's also not clear whether the randomized display goes though all options before reshowing.
There is a the downside, the menu can be a challenge. There are four different modes, pictures, sounds, video and calendar with picture display. I tried to do it by guessing and gave up and did a RTM (read the manual). To set the schedule you must go to the calendar mode and edit the scheudle. Then leave the calendar and go to the slideshow. When starting the slideshow a "schedule" icon appears temporarily in the lower left hand corner, if you press enter, the schedule is activated to auto-shutoff. The slideshow duration is on the main config menu (keep hitting exit on remote). It's not intuitive but the documentation online is clear.
There's many other features I could be using but am not (like sound and video). Note that I called before pickiing this frame, apparently the other pandigital frames do not (as far as I know) have the 1 and 24 hour options on the slideshow. They, however, have a touchscreen to move to the next frame which this does not (although nice if it was being presented to a group of folks, it didn't make sense to me since the remote moves to the next frame easily enough).
So in short, the ergonomics of the menu interface could be improved, but it's awesome and now a permanent fixture in our house.
It's really nice to finaly see all the pictures which have been hanging out on our harddrive without a 60s second "flicker" from the corner of the room. - Digital Picture Frame'
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