Digital Spectrum MemoryFrame 8000 Premium U-40100 8-Inch Wireless Digital Frame

a total POS
I ordered a Sony DPF-D80 8-Inch, but didn't like it 100% because of the lacking wireless and inability to play videos. I thought, this Digital Spectrum frame would be better. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a total piece of junk:

- it's big and disproportionally ugly (frame, inside a frame, inside a frame - the default Amazon image is showing a 10-inch model, I think)
- image quality is horrible, both, in terms of resolution, and lack of color depth
- the video feature is unusable - jerky and stops with errors

I didn't even try the wireless feature, since there is no way I'm going to keep this frame.

Compared to Sony DPF-D80 8-Inch, the Digital Spectrum frame is an ugly monster.

The way digital frames were meant to be
I LOVE this product. I purchased a frame that was not wireless, but was highly rated here at Amazon, but it did not offer near the flexibility that Digital Spectrum does, so I returned it and got this one (by the way, Amazon is the BOMB for easy returns!). Not only can I select which photos to view in each slide show, but the REAL benefit for this product is being able to upload them remotely. I use it as an "info kiosk" of sorts for my business - hrs of operation, specials, etc. I can change it daily as we have new specials, etc - works great for people with no artistic or graphic skills because I can use software that have cool "templates" to make me LOOK GOOD. However, I think this would even be better for someone wanting to share photos with a grandparent who might not be "technology savy". All they need is an internet connection with a wireless router installed (something that comes with many cable subscriptions), and they can automatically update the pictures their grandparents see - all without ever touching the unit, and all without ever asking their grandparent to touch the device - HOW COOL IS THAT!?! I love this thing, and would highly recommend it to anyone wanting to share photos with a family member who just "doesn't get technology", but who is willing to have the internet installed.

So far so good
I looked at reviews for all the wireless frames in the market. They all scared me to a point were I didn't want to buy any of them, but finally went with this one. Actually wanted the 10.4" frame, but figured if its altogether a bust then at least I can buy my parents dinner (with the I didn't spend) as a makeup gift. :)

Got it fast from Amazon. Ordered it Wednesday night free slow boat shipping and it showed up the following Monday. Ok, happy with that.

Got the box open and looked inside. Some interesting packaging, but everything looked good.

Plugged it in, didn't read the manual. Navigated the menus and found network setup. It found my network. Clicked it, entered the WEP key. Done. Well you hope so. As one review pointed out, it just brings you back to the menu, so if you got it right, great. Not sure what you see if you get it wrong.

Then, I went to setup an RSS feed because what I really want to do is email pictures to my parent's frame and have them magically appear. So I had previously played with FrameChannel and knew what I needed to do. I entered the RSS feed URL. This was painfully long with the remote, but got it done and apparently it was correct.

Next, I hit play slideshow AND ... only the canned pictures came up. Ok, read the setup instructions on FrameChannel, very concise. Followed them and WOW! Pictures started coming down. (I needed to set the source for the slideshow) Then I started emailing a bunch of pictures to the framesend.com address they give you and then figured out how to get them to automatically become active when they are from an invited source on FrameChannel. Now they just flow to the frame.

All in all a pretty good experience so far.

If I run into any trouble, I will post an update.

Part of a digital solution
Now that I've gone digital, I actually look at my photos even more than when they were stored in bulky albums and shoe boxes. Screen savers are nice, but I usually have a browser, my mail program, and a host of other stuff on my screen, so all I'd see would be strips and corners. My camera is digital. Why shouldn't my picture display be digital?

The Digital Spectrum MemoryFrame 8000 Premium U-40100 is a pretty sophisticated piece of work. To start with, it is not ugly. It contains a Windows CE computer that can support WiFi, USB, memory cards and Bluetooth, which is better than some laptops I've owned. The WiFi works pretty well. It's up on my WPA2 Apple Extreme/Express network. I had to enter the password with the remote control to get it started, but it is now a networked computer. I tested it out with Flickr, and it could download my photos and take advantage of Flickr's new photo "sets" folders.

I tried it with a Bluetooth dongle and set it up as an "other" device with no password / pairing code. Send file works. The image I send from my Apple laptop pops up on the picture frame nicely, but I cannot browse the frame's internal storage. In fact, once I try to browse, I can no longer send.

I hooked up a USB cable to my computer and was able to access the frame as a disk drive. That was pretty neat, but I would prefer a wireless solution. I haven't tried camera memory cards or a direct camera connection because I store my photos on my laptop. Since I backup my laptop, that means I back up my photos. I can't imagine why anyone with a home computer would care about this feature except for carrying photos to someone without email without burning a CD.

Supposedly, the frame can grab pictures from Windows machines running Windows Media Player 11. I don't have a Windows machine, so I couldn't test this. I do know that the current version cannot display photos shared using iPhoto's sharing mechanism.

If you want an easy to use, flexible, wireless digital picture frame, I'll recommend the Digital Spectrum MemoryFrame. It's not completely wireless. It needs a power cord, but, as I noted earlier, it's not ugly. With a bit of camouflage, it's a great way to enjoy your pictures.

Of course, Chez Kaleberg, I like to push the technology a bit, so I took advantage of push technology, and here we see one of the frame's weak points. It really wants to pull. If you hook up a USB cable, you can mount the frame as a disk and load whatever pictures you want into it, but it cannot be mounted as a disk using WiFi. I tried a port scan. The only ports were for a web site server, 80 and 443. This frame is actually running Apache, if that means anything to you. What I was hoping for was an Windows SMB service, or better yet, an FTP socket. That way, I could just load in the pictures I wanted to show.

Instead, I took advantage of another feature of the frame, it's ability to display pictures from an arbitrary public RSS picture feed. Since I have my own web site, I could just store a feed there and tell the frame to bring in any pictures I wanted from the internet in general or from my local network. That means I can show webcam images from national parks, personal photos, website photos, business charts and weather reports. What a neat toy! I would have given it five stars, save for the lack of an FTP server.