Philips 6.5-Inch Digital Picture Frame (Clear) w/3 Additional Colored Frames

Customer Reviews:

Very nice but pricey gift that has learning curve
This is a very nice gift for relatives who complain about not having enough pictures of you and your family. It's easy to use, it saves shelf space, and the beauty of it is, you can set it up for your grandma so that she doesn't have to fuss with it (not that she would want to). All she has to do is turn the frame on and off.

I'm giving this frame as a gift, so I loaded up around 30 pictures from my PC. The software to do this -- it's called Photo Manager -- is basic and no-frills. It is a drag-and-drop application which grandma could probably learn to use. The picture frame is recognized by your PC as a USB storage device; copying picture files over is very easy and fast.

The frame itself is pretty nice. It doesn't look or feel like cheap wares. I didn't bother with the other color frames; I just stuck to the metal-looking one. More importantly, the screen is pretty good, not perfect, but pretty darn good. I tested it on maximum brightness, and although some of the JPEGs looked too saturated, I wasn't looking at the frame in full daylight conditions. A note though: I also resized all my pictures in Photoshop to 480x720 (portrait mode) before loading them into the frame's memory. The pictures looked great.

The frame's control interface leaves a lot to be desired. It's easy enough to use once you get the hang of it: the buttons on back basically act as up, down, left, right, confirm. But tech-phobe grandma won't be attempting to change the settings. The interface is just not intuitive enough, and the buttons are kind of small for those who lack dexterity or have arthritis.

I still definitely recommend this frame as a gift if you have money to burn and want to wow the old folks with digital technology. I suspect that digital frames will become more popular, so let's hope the quality improves.

--2006-12-17

Good, but it takes some learning
I gave this as a gift to someone, but I loaded photographs on it before I gave it. The visual quality is really nice looking, but it did take me much longer than I thought to learn the user interfaces of the unit and the included CD software. Nice looking once you get it up and going, but it takes longer to get it set up then you might think.
--2006-12-15

great image, user friendly
got this for an in-law, so I wanted to make sure I could show them how to set it up. It was so easy I never finished reading the instructions. Being able to use the USB cord that comes with it to plug it right into the computer and transfer in photos (just like transferring to a jump drive) made my life very easy. Lots of settings for scrolling through pictures (how quickly, which pictures, what "effect" to use in the transition"). I'm a fan, hope they like it!
--2006-12-13

Customer Service Warning
Can't really rate the frame because it was defective out of the box. Saw a couple of pictures of mine on it before it went completely and it has good resolution. However, I will warn you about Customer Service at Philips, or rather more acurately, the lack thereof. If you have problems, do not, repeat, do not call Philips for help (unless you speak Hindee, they still would know nothing about the product, but you could probably have nice chat about something) and do not send it to them for exchange. Get help, refund, exchange only from Amazon for this one. Trust me.
--2006-12-13

Wonderful, but badly flawed.
The praise for this digital picture in other reviews is well deserved. I produces clear, bright pictures. I bought one for my mother, to cycle through hundreds of family and travel photos, as reminders of these good times. In the end, I'm not sure I will give it to her. It could be more trouble to her than it's worth.

I've had quite a trial getting to this point. The first unit I received had a mechanical defect: the SD card slot would not latch the card without much fiddling. Amazon replaced the unit without question. My plan was to resize my 500-600 pictures to the resolution of the display so that they would fit nicely on an SD card. I put them on my freshly-formatted 1 GB card, and none of them appeared. After much fiddling--there is no information in the manual or on line--I discovered that the folder structure and file names have to match a supported camera. I aped my Canon file structure, down to file names like IMG_0001.jpg. Yes, the funny file names seem to be required.

Past this first hurdle, I put my 568 photos on the card and let 'er go. I found that after an hour or two, the screen just went blank. This was with a photo-change-rate of 2 per minute. I tried various experiments, with no luck. Sometimes, instead of a blank screen, the unit stopped the slide show in thumbnail mode and had to be restarted. I exchanged email with Philips customer service (after finding nothing at all useful on the web site other than the user manuals). They said I should phone.

I did, and spent 30 minutes with a pleasant but inexperienced rep who went through the manual and a little bit of additional guidance Philips gave her. She could tell me nothing, though she acknowledged the problem. She said I should return the unit. I persisted, and even though Philips has no escalation procedure for this product, we agreed I should talk to her supervisor. He was more technical, and very sympathetic. He confirmed the obvious technical things--how I'd downsized the files, that I was using .jpg format, etc. He said I was doing it all right. He too acknowledged my problem. He said to be sure I was not using a card larger than 1 GB, but 1 GB was OK. Don't use the CF card slot (I wasn't, though I tried it and had the same problem). He suggested I reduce the number of photos on the card, but had no other suggestion other than to return the unit.

I took about 80 photos off the card, so that the total was under 500, and it's been behaving OK for several days, switching photos at two per hour (change every 30 minutes). I don't trust the unit not to give my mom problems.

Bottom line: This is a great picture frame in terms of size and picture quality. It's easy enough to use (but not as easy as they claim). It works just fine with 55 or so pictures stored on its internal memory. But the problems I had relate to the basic function of the unit. It's a software problem that is so basic I can only wonder whether the engineers at Philips did any meaningful testing of the product before shipping it. If showing 50 or 60 photos meets your needs, I recommend the frame. If you want to show hundreds of pictures from a camera card, seek elsewhere.
--2006-12-11

- Philips