Thursday 1 September 2011

4 3 Aspect Ratio - digital photo frame, pandigital


Got this as a Christmas present for my mom. Loaded some test pictures on there just to ensure picture quality was good and that it worked reasonably well. Have read some reviews (while researching DPFs) that some DPFs are not worth buying. Issues with picture quality and ease of use.



There are two ways you can put pictures on this frame. There is a memory card slot in the back and you can also connect this unit to your computer with the supplied USB cable.



I had no problem connecting and uploading 20 mb of pictures. Display quality is excellent. It does auto crop pictures so that they don't looked stretched or distorted.



I read another review about how to adjust picture sizes so that this unit does not have to auto crop.



Although I haven't used the ap to auto crop yet, basically you have to download Microsoft Photo Story from microsoft to do so. I'm sure there are other apps, free or otherwise that do so.



Very happy with this unit. Now wife wants one. I would say, anything less that 10 inches is a waste of money. I do not see how a 7 inch frame would provide a nice veiwable screen.



You can change how frequently the images change, whether or not it crops them. Lots of features. The only con I have is its a little hard to use menu. Read the manual...



A~ Pandigital PanImage PI1003DW 10.1-Inch Digital Picture Frame (Black)

I got this photo frame for my father for Christmas and filled it with some pictures before I wrapped it. My parents divorced when I was 7, and somehow my father didn't seem to receive any of the pictures of my me and my twin sister after my folks had split. When I graduated college my mother made me a scrapbook and my father, looking through it, mentioned that he didn't have any of these pictures and "that's where they all went". So I took my Canon scanner and took some pages out of my scrapbook, and scanned some of the photos to put in this frame, which gave me a pretty good indication of how this product works.



Pros:



It's a nice looking frame. It can hang on the wall, which is a must for my dad and stepmom, who have a two year-old at home. It also has a plastic fold-out leg to sit on a table. The leg actually comes out and extends, which was not glaringly obvious at first. I only figured it out after the frame slid over several times.



The picture quality is good. The pixels present on the frame are very minimal, and not present at all when viewing the frame from several feet away.



It comes with a remote which is pretty handy if you've ever seen anyone trying to change things by pressing all over the frame.



It is versatile as far as input goes: You can put pictures on the frame with a USB cord to the internal memory, or use an array of memory cards, or even a memory stick (although I'm not sure that you would want to).



Features: You can change the duration of the slides, the effects from one picture to another (fade, roll, etc), the randomness of the photos, etc. You can edit the photos so that they appear a certain way in the frame only, although this only works for photos saved to the hard drive.



Cons:



It comes with two mattes for the frame. One is black, the color of the frame, and the other is white. I cannot see any reason you would want to use the white one. I think its a waste of materials and a pointless inclusion.



Ease of use: When I first opened the frame, I inserted an 8 gb memory card into the slot and plugged it into my computer. Two devices appeared on my Macbook Pro's desktop: One that said Panimage (okay, obviously the frame), and the other that said "No Name". It took me a few minutes to realize that the panimage icon was for the hard drive in the frame, and the other was the memory card. I dragged and dropped the images, but was unsure of where I was supposed to put them. Also, I dragged and dropped images I had exported from Aperature, a photo editing program. I always shoot photos in RAW + large, and when examining the frame, I realized it had also imported the Raw format as well. All of these images were in the frame as "unsupported format" taking up space. I feel that there should be something that rejects the unsupported formats, so I wouldn't have to erase them all manually afterwards.



Another thing that was a bit of a bummer is that you cannot play the slideshow from the internal memory as well as the memory card. Its one or the other.



I read another review that stated the remote did not work. Mine did, but barely. Its nice that it came with a remote, but it felt cheap and was tiny. The buttons did not have much of a tactile response and it sometimes took two or three presses of a button, pointed directly at the screen for it to register.



The crop aspect ratio is off, as I've seen others mention. If you choose to fit the images to the frame, it chops off the top inch or so for any photos that are shoot in the vertical orientation. It worked great for photos in the 4x3 aspect. Unfortunately, because many heads were chopped off with this setting, I took it off, forcing all photos to be seen with a slight black border around them. This essentially made the photos smaller.



Conclusion:



Its a good frame for the money. I've seen many other frames go for a lot more. This has some customizable features which you may choose to use or not, but you aren't paying a ridiculous price for them. Once you get past figuring out how to use it and make it look the way you want, it does have a nice, sleek design. To me, that was one of the most important things. - Photo Frame - Dpf - Digital Photo Frame - Pandigital'


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