Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 65
 Beautiful Pics November 10, 2008
Art (New Jersey)
85 out of 87 found this review helpful
After doing a ton of research, I settled on this frame mostly by process of elimination (and the fact that while there are not a ton of reviews on Sony frames, they are mostly all good). I eliminated many others because (1) most other frames are not in the 4:3 aspect ratio (meaning black bars on your pics); (2) most other frames have mediocre reviews (for example, no Kodak frame (the market leader) does better then 3.5 stars on Amazon over tons of reviews; and (3) many frames by lesser known brands appear to have serious and scary quality control issues that are ignored/not caught by professional reviews, but show up in user reviews.
This frame definitely costs more for the size and features, but the pics look awesome, and I'm confident that if there is a problem, I have a reliable company to go to. It was super easy to get set up, I put 350 pics in a folder, ran a batch resizer on them to get them to 800x600 (not really necessary given the amount of on-board memory on the unit, but the I figured my PC plus a good free resizer program would probably do better then the unit itself at resizing), connected the frame by USB cable to the PC and copied that folder to the unit and that was pretty much that. For the price, a bigger picture frame would be nice, but really the 8 inch screen size is great for your desk at work.
great but some things to know December 8, 2008
renbur yar (nc)
74 out of 76 found this review helpful
...bought this as a gift and combed my hard drive for images the recipient would like. found 600 of them. tried to copy to a 2G SD card, because frame itself couldn't handle that much data on its own (tried a batch resizer but that somehow prevented auto-orientation so half the pics were distorted- no good). kept getting an error (0x80070052) though, would only copy about 400 of 600 pics despite plenty of room. after some googling, i learned to format the card in FAT32 first (NTS or whatever wouldn't work in this frame). this is a dropdown menu option under 'file' when you have the card open on your pc.
well, this worked: it copied all the pics and the sony frame supports that format. after that, wow, frame is wonderful. great display, easy enuf menu to navigate, nice remote.
in researching my challenge i learned that this is a common problem. hopefully this post will help someone spend less than the two hours it took me to get things up and running.
Still five stars even though it has a few quirks... May 27, 2009
Scooterdog (Gaithersburg, MD United States)
34 out of 34 found this review helpful
I bought a pair of these after reading and studying many many LCD frames (although it is the first one for me to purchase). Quality of the image was most important - I simply do not care for putting mp3's or video on this, our family just needs to 'unlock' all the 1000's of pictures that reside in my PC.
The 800x600 resolution and picture quality is outstanding, and as mentioned the menu system is very straightforward. I bought a second unit for my in-laws (they live in China and do not speak any English) so having a unit that runs on 120/220V was important, as well as having menus in different languages (this unit has a lot of languages). I was even able to download a Chinese-language manual and print it out for the in-laws (they do not have a computer) so they should be all set.
After several days of playing around with it, there are a number of 'quirks' that took some research to figure out. First is the resolution - all my digital pictures are from a Nikon D50, that saves jpgs in a 3008x2000 pixel format, which is known as a "3:2" ratio (width to height). Well 800x600 is a "4:3" ratio, so either a setting in one of the menus to make internal adjustments is one way to go, but it will automatically crop all your pictures, or you will have black bars on the top and bottom of the screen (not a major problem but irritating nonetheless).
I found a simple program called 'Frame Size' that will batch process a pile of pictures, one crop at a time, as well as reduce a 3MB 3008x2000 file into a ~300kb 800x600 one. This way I was able to do a 'custom crop' and downsize each file to the exact 800x600 format for this digital frame, and then have each picture custom-cropped so no heads/faces were lost in the process.
Another quirk was how it views the 'date photo taken'. It uses the 'modified' date and not the actual EXIF date from the jpg! It drove me crazy not to have the pile of pictures not show up in order. I used a non-freeware 'Picture Information Extractor' to re-write the 'date modified' data from the EXIF 'date photo taken' and that solved it promptly, it worked in batch format. There are some freeware (one from Microsoft called Microsoft Pro Photo Tools 2 sounded promising) but it did not offer batch processing of the EXIF data editing.
The multiple options for viewing pictures and the varying time delays for the slideshow is great, and after figuring out the above-mentioned 'quirks' it now works the way I wanted it to. (It should have worked this way from the beginning.) I'm very pleased with the product though, so I believe it deserves a five-star rating.
 Excellent Digital Picture Frame May 23, 2009
nattums
13 out of 13 found this review helpful
This review is for the 8" Sony Digital Picture Frame (Model #DPF-D80). I specifically wanted this photo frame because it has the 4:3 aspect ratio and that is what all my picture are taken in. I didn't want to get any of the widescreen frames (16:9 aspect ratio) and have my pictures be stretched, cropped and/or have the black bars on the sides or tops of each picture. Also, I just wanted my pictures to be displayed. No need for video or music being played or viewing a clock. Just a basic digital picture frame and that is what this is.
So far I have loaded over 700 pictures on this frame using a 4GB Memory Stick Pro Duo that I keep inserted into the frame at all times. This frame only has 256MB internal memory (actually less with the software included on the internal memory), which isn't a whole lot. They say you can load up to 500 photos to the internal memory and I got to 441 pictures before the internal memory became full. More on that later.
I have had no problems with errors, pictures not downloading or pictures not being able to be viewed with this frame. What I do is download every picture taken with my digital cameras (or scan hard copies of pictures) and save them onto my computer. I then resize them with InfranView and re-save them on my computer. I then use Roxio Easy Media Creator to adjust the colors and sharpness before I do a final re-save to my computer. 75% of my pictures loaded onto this frame are in 1024x768 resolution and are each about 600-800KB in size. For that size and resolution I'm amazed I got close to the 500 pictures allowed on the internal memory. My computer does not have a slot for a memory card so I had to do some extra steps to get all my pictures saved on the memory card. I copied the most allowed pictures onto the internal drive of the picture frame and then exported them all to the memory card. I then erased them all on the internal drive of the picture frame and repeated the steps again. Now I view them all with the memory card and can keep adding until the memory card is full. The color and quality of the pictures are amazing. This is one of a few 8" frames that has the 800x600 resolution. All the 8" Kodak picture frames I was looking at were only in 800x480 resolution and was no where near as clear and vibrant as this Sony picture frame.
Why this did not receive "5" stars is: small internal memory, very expensive for a basic digital picture frame and the frame easily attracts fingerprints. Also, to view your pictures as a slideshow via the shoot date doesn't mean so. If you have a picture taken in 1990 but you resized, changed the color or brightness in 2009 and then re-saved it.......the picture now has a modification date of 2009 and that is how the picture will play in shoot order. I haven't viewed my slideshow in the "Random" view, so I don't know how often the same photo would repeat.
 Vivid photos, wimpy remote control September 13, 2009
R. Lacey (Florida, United States)
12 out of 12 found this review helpful
The frame displays photos very well, and adjusts them well to fit the frame. The small remote control is powered by a little disk battery and is very weak. To use the RC, you have to be a foot or so from the frame and point it exactly at the lower right corner of the frame. I loaded the frame with pictures and gave it to my 85-year-old mother, who has zero chance of using the remote control successfully. The buttons on the frame are on the back of the right side. The on/off button is lit, so my mother can press it. But the other three buttons would have to be pushed by feel rather than sight, another impossibility for my mother. I loaded the pictures via USB from my computer, and stored them in the frame in a logical order. But there is no option for displaying the pictures in the order in which they're stored. You can have a slide show in reverse time order by modification dates of the files, or randomly. Randomly would alarm my mother. I chose the frame in part because it has a glass cover over the screen, so my mother can clean it. We've noticed no glare from the glass. I inserted the Sony memory card from my Sony camera into the Sony frame, and it was not acceptable. Apparently the frame does not deal with MagicGate.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 65
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