Philips 9-Inch Digital Picture Frame (Metal) | 
| Brand: Philips
List Price: $249.99
Buy New: $199.95
You Save: $50.04 (20%)
New (2) Refurbished (1) from $129.99
Rating:  220 reviews
Color: Metal
Media: Electronics
Autographed: No
Memorabilia: No
Native Resolution: 9
Display Size: 9
Removable Memory: CompactFlash Type I
Shipping Weight (lbs): 7
Dimensions (in): 6 x 12 x 10
Legal Disclaimer: Warranty does not cover misuse of product.
MPN: 9FF2CME/37
Model: 9FF2CME/37
UPC: 609585125469
EAN: 0609585125469
ASIN: B000HWS0Q2
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Features:
| • | Displays your digital photos with professional print quality and the full spectrum of colors | | • | 9-inch TFT LCD display screen features of adjustable brightness to match ambient light conditions, and intuitive operation that doesn't require any programming | | • | Connects via USB directly to your camera or PC; supports up to 12-megapixel photos in the JPEG format | | • | Runs on AC power via the included adapter, or lasts up to 8 hours on its included rechargeable battery | | • | Weighs approximately 2.2 pounds |
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Product Description
Those old photo albums gathering dust on closet shelves that are brought out for family get-togethers are becoming obsolete. Digital cameras allow images to be brightly, and easily, displayed on LCD screens. This picture frame uses an LCD screen and surrounds it with a decorative border so you can comfortably place it on your dresser, table, or wall. You can load its internal memory directly from your PC - transferring images directly to its USB port. Or you can take a memory card from your digital-camera and gather up photos from there. Then you can arrange photos to appear fixed, or change them automatically at timed intervals, or create unique "slide" shows. So why closet precious moments of your life when you can display them properly on this 9" (diagonal) digital picture frame from Philips. And when you don't want to see images, simply turn the Philips 9FF2CME picture frame off. But you'll be so impressed with the qualities of the Philips 9FF2CME that, we think, you'll enjoy leaving it on. Then you can take your older photos, from those albums in your closet, digitize them by scanning into your PC, and view them on your Philips 9FF2CME as well. Get two or more - for different rooms in your home or to share with family and friends. It's a new, remarkable, and unique way of viewing pictures. Automatically turn on and off display at programmable preset times daily Create albums, slide shows, and manage photos Includes AC adapter, quick start guide, stand, USB cable, and user guide on CD-ROM 9FF2CME/37 is manufactured and designed for use in the USA by Philips
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| Customer Reviews: Read 215 more reviews...
Good image, decent features, 8-inch screen November 16, 2006
G. Levy (SF, CA)
228 out of 233 found this review helpful
I just received this in the mail. I think the feature set is decent, and it was able to connect to my PC without much ado. Transfer of images isn't too hard. You can load images from memory cards or directly from your PC (or Mac, apparently) via a USB cable. And it has good control options (frequency of image changes from 5 seconds to 1 day, effects for changes, auto on/off for weekends and 3 on/off settings for weekdays). I also like that it has different "fill" options for shots that are portrait when the display is oriented for landscape (and vice versa). It will take the full-size portrait and surround it with smaller portrait images to fill in the display, thus avoiding any cropping of the main large image. This is a particularly nice feature. You can also create separate albums to segregate the images that are shown...
HOWEVER, do be warned that the display measures 8-inches diagnoally, not the advertised 9. This isn't unusual for old TV sets, but it's a bit unusual to have an LCD screen overstated by this much.
Also, the leg on the back of the frame is a bit odd. It has two "pre-set" options that force the face of the frame to be too steep in my opinion. You can swivel it outside these "preset" ranges, but doing so too much causes the fame to tilt off-center. The user manual even recognizes this problem by stating you should only use the pre-sets. There is a mounting backet included, which is handy.
The frame plugs into an outlet and charges the battery. I'm not sure how long the battery will last, though. The cord is white, and the plug is a larger, cell-phone size rectangular cube (about 1 inch x 2 inches x 1.5 inches).
The colors in the display are good, but dark colors lose their saturation, so a dark blue looks almost black. But other colors have good tone and don't appear too bluish, an issue with many LCD displays.
I like the wood grain w/ silver frame, which is magnetic and snaps onto the front. I'm not sure if you can purchase other frames that snap on, but it seems likely.[...]
 Absolutely wonderful !!! December 5, 2006
Brian (Centerville, Utah)
120 out of 122 found this review helpful
My wife and I have bought two of these (one for us and one for her parents). The screen is extremely clear and bright. The size is perfect to view your digital photos. It is simple to hook-up to a computer and download pictures from a digital camera or a scanner. With a 1 GB SD flash memory card we have about one thousand pictures loaded and plenty of room for more pictures. It's great to see all your pictures easily instead on them being put away in a photo album or stored on your computer doing nothing. We love the different transitions in the slide show mode that are available. We also like being able to unplug from the AC adapter and sit down and look through them one at a time at our own pace. The rechargeable battery lasts about one hour. The built-in clock allows us to automatically turn the picture frame on and off at set times.
This digital picture frame is a winner. If you have a digital camera then you will absolutely love this. It also makes a great gift for parents and grandparents. Just load your family pictures both past and recent and enjoy the memories.
 Good to look at, horrible to operate February 3, 2007
Petros Maniatis (Mountain View, CA, USA)
92 out of 100 found this review helpful
I chose this frame over its competitors mainly because of Philips brand recognition, and because it looked the best among all offerings. The frame basically works out of the box, and if you don't touch it, you can have nice, smooth slideshows that you'll enjoy. The best mode of operation I found on it was just plugging in a CF card straight from a camera. And honestly, it does look great as a frame I'd put on a coffee table somewhere, compared to its clunky competitors.
Unfortunately, the operative words are "don't touch"!
However, these frames are meant for people who are not tech savvy, and they are meant to be updated with new pictures frequently. The Philips 8' frame failed completely on both accounts, making this purchase one of the worst electronics shopping experiences of my electronics shopping career!
First of all, it doesn't like all JPEGs, it only likes some JPEGs. If you have photos that Adobe Photoshop has even looked at (with standards compliant updates of metadata, for instance) the frame goes crazy and shows giant X marks where the photo should be, taking several seconds to show even the X mark during preview. Everyone else shows the photos (web browsers, the MS picture viewer, photoshop, cameras) but the frame just refuses. For such photos, you have to slog through their own software to have them resized and metadata-sanitized, which works less than half of the time (see below).
Second of all, the user interface on the frame, though not entirely unreasonable, is completely incompatible with the notion of having LOTS of photos in it. Basically, if you're in thumbnail mode looking at photo #500 out of #1000, you have to page through all 500 photos before the one you're looking at, before you'll be allowed to exit the browsing menu. Especially if you're unlucky enough to have presented the frame with 500 of the JEPG files it doesn't like (taking several seconds to show each X thumbnail), getting out of the menu can take up your entire day. Who came up with that brilliant idea?
As others have already said, the PC software for managing photos on the frame is an absolutely unacceptable piece of trash. It doesn't work if you drag and drop photos too fast, it doesn't work with all flash cards (it doesn't like SD cards very much, especially those used with Canon cameras, whereas it's OK with CF cards as far as I can tell), it spends entire days trying to come up with the thumbnails of photos you want to move into the frame (even though MS Windows already has the thumbnails precomputed in the directories already). Furthermore, it keeps failing in interesting yet inexplicable ways, such as claiming you do not have enough space on the storage device, even when you have 80% free on the on-board storage. Forget about removing photos via the software; you'll just regret it. Certainly, don't expect to mix and match photos, manage albums, move in photos from a PC, consolidate photo stores, etc.
To top it all off, on day 3 of its use, one of the two frames I purchased just stopped working. The on/off button was on, but nothing was going on on the screen; no brigthness adjustment, no on/off switching, no resetting with the paperclip got it to relent and start showing something, anything, ever again.
The Philips support was offensive and unbelievably incompetent. After waiting for 45 minutes (I am not exaggerating folks), I got a person who basically recited the pitiful FAQ on the Philips web site for me. There was no way to speak to a technical person to escalate. Instead, I was asked to return their broken frame to them, at my own expense, and wait for 8-13 weeks for a replacement. Are these guys for real? Seriously.
I've owned many Philips devices over the years. It hasn't always been a beautiful experience, but overall I have had no reason to hate Philips before. This frame really changed my view of the entire company. Basically, I will never buy another Philips component again, unless my life depends on it (perhaps not even then...)
Philips 9" Digital Photo Frame ..... sweet November 4, 2006
M. Rea (Lenexa, Kansas United States)
91 out of 94 found this review helpful
I've only had this for a couple of days so durability is an unknown - but over all I'm extremely pleased. Very nice image display, both size and quality. Attractive and solid build. Even the packaging is impressive.
Was considering one of the 7" models when these came out. Based on a quick review of the older 7" instruction manual vs the newer 9", it appears they significantly upgraded the feature set on the new version. Lots of album and slideshow options, transition effects, timing options, etc.
The display is crisp and clean and looks great on my desk at the office, and actualy exceeds my expectations.
It's not perfect, though. It won't recognize photos on a memory card unless you move them to the root directory. And large files seem to overwhelm it. After a couple of days of new digital photo frame goofin', it appears that it's able to successfully read, compress and copy files up to around 5MB. Anything there abouts or larger gets lost. It wouldn't have been that big a deal except that it's able to read the larger photos, so the load and copy process appears to take place ... until you notice later that some of the photos are missing.
The large file issue is kind of a pain - but I cropped all the images to the frames 3/2 aspect before loading them anyway, so once I knew the large files were a problem it was only one additional step to compress them to something <5MB.
I gotta admit it seems overpriced - but the image quality is spot on.
 flawed yet I love it December 3, 2006
Matthew Henry (ANN ARBOR, MI USA)
77 out of 78 found this review helpful
The transfer software which runs on the desktop doesn't recognize my second hard drive, which is very bizarre. It's a perfectly normal hard drive but the software can't see that it has folders in it. Also, if you click on an album with a bunch of pictures in it, go get yourself a cup of coffee because it creates thumbnails for each picture and it's very, very slow. While you are getting the cup of coffee, the frame will almost certainly lock up. The transfer software seems to cause the frame to lock up very often. It locks up while deleting pictures, it locks up while copying pictures. Nice.
Basically I found the software that ships with it to be entirely useless. Instead I used irfanview to resize 5,500 pictures to 720x540 and put them on a 1 GIG SD card instead.
The UI for the frame itself is frustrating non-intuitive. So it takes a bit of effort to get it set up the way you like it. I definitely wouldn't give this to grandma and expect her to figure it out.
Another disappointment. The "random" feature is only random within a album (album = folder). So if I have 20 folders with 200 pictures in each and I set it to random, I'll see all 200 pictures in the first folder displayed in a random order, then it moves on to the second folder. This wasn't acceptable so I moved all 5,500 pictures in one folder. The frame seems to handle that ok, though with that many pictures it takes around 5 seconds to start up before the slideshow kicks in. I don't find that excessive, and the transition time between pictures is short (at least when they are resized to 720x540). The transition effects are cute but I imagine that they would get old pretty quickly. They can be turned off. The method of handling vertically-oriented pictures is quite clever. It displays the picture oriented vertically and fills in the rest of the space with 4 more much smaller copies of the picture. That actually looks quite nice.
Now on to the frame itself. It looks nice and modern and iPody. I was concerned when I booted the thing up and looked at the display for the first time. The text looked washed out and blurry. However, when you view actual pictures on it, they look very good. When I bought this frame it was labeled as a 9" screen. Now amazon has changed it to 8.5" screen. It is, in fact, an 8" screen. The entire frame measured diagonally is 11". So I'm not sure where they got "9 inches" from. Apparently no one at Philips knows how to use a ruler. Having said that, the picture is pretty big. It's just the right size if you are going to keep it on your desk next to your monitor.
According to my wattmeter, the frame pulls 4 Watts when it's on and 0 Watts when it's off or on standby. Which means, if my calculations are correct, you could let it run continuously for a month and it would only cost you a quarter. The battery backup seems sorta useless, as I plan on keeping it on my desk. But it's kind of nice to be able to unplug it and not worry about losing your settings.
My overall impression: after all my complaints, I still love it. I'm dinging it several notches for the terrible, terrible software on both the frame and the desktop and Philips' lying about the screen size. With all that, once you have it up and running it's pretty sweet.
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