Kodak EasyShare SV-710 7-Inch Digital Picture Frame

neat product
This digital picture frame was a perfect christmas gift for grandpa! He enjoys seeing all the pictures we loaded on a memory stick for him and it is very easy to set up and use.

Terrible Photo Frame; Shockingly Low-Quality
I can't begin to tell you how awful this product is.

First off, a bit of background on your humble reviewer. I'm a self-taught geek who does computer tech support as one of my jobs. I've never met a computer problem I couldn't fix, and I do it on a daily basis, sometimes simply for fun.

So you can imagine my frustration when I purchased this product for my wife's birthday back in June, only to discover that the networking functionality is essentially broken, even with the newest firmware (which is from October 2007, and ships on Amazon's stock of the frames). I was able to get things up and running fairly quickly. The frame connects to the network with WPA encryption and successfully sees the computer. I can even begin playing a pictures slideshow from my Windows Media Player server (which is how you have to set it up to work with a wireless network).

However--and it never fails--the frame inevitably will freeze after so long. Well, it doesn't even freeze; half the time it simply reboots itself and begins playing its built-in collection of stock photos, right in the middle of your network slideshow. I have ruled out networking problems by trying two different routers. Firewalls are not an issue. To make matters worse, sometimes the frame will not pick up on the Playlists you have configured... meaning, they'll simply not show up in the listings. That leaves you to choose "All Pictures", which are then displayed sequentially each and every time. A quick call to product support quickly revealed that they are completely inept and simply reading from a punch list of troubleshooting options ("Sir, I must now suggest that you check to see if the frame is too far from the router.") Eck.

Perhaps this all wouldn't be so bad if there were some way to get the frame to shuffle playback. YOU CAN'T. THERE IS NO RANDOM/SHUFFLE OPTION on this frame. The only way to shuffle your playback is to configure a playlist that is preshuffled via Windows Media Player and then load the playlist onto your frame--if you have so much luck, as many times, as previously mentioned, you can't even get the playlists to show up.

This product is, quite simply put, a piece of plastic trash that hardly even performs its basic functions. The quality control and, perhaps equally disturbing, product support for these frames is bottom-of-the-barrel. I advise you to avoid this product at all costs, as well as any future frames by Kodak. (Their newest line of updated frames still doesn't support shuffle playback by the way.)

I will be headed to CES this week to see what else is available and upcoming in the photo frame market. I am already strongly considering a purchase of a Sony frame to replace this junk. Its ratings are much higher, it reportedly never freezes, and it does include the elusive shuffle function.

CLIFF'S NOTES: YOUR TECHNOLOGICAL PROWESS IS IRRELEVANT; THIS FRAME IS BROKEN. STAY FAR, FAR AWAY.

Stay away from this product
I have had this frame for 13 months. It broke. I went to get it fixed from kodak and they told me that it is out of warranty and it would cost $150 to fix. I refused to pay them another dime and will buy another manufacturer's model for that same price.

Colours are vivid but not accurate and clipped
One thing that first came to my mind when I turned the frame on and saw my pictures on it is - "Why no one here talks about bad colour reproduction of the frame?" The colour is not natural, and worst of all it is "clipped" (lacks smooth transition). Put a picture with fine variety of shades (for example on a sky) on this frame and you will see what I mean.

The only reason I kept the frame - wifi enabled access to online gallery.

The colours are very poor. (And don't look at those kodak picked demo pictures preloaded on the frame - they are made to look good on it).

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