Home > Consumer Reviews > Portable USA PU-10W 10.4-Inch Digital Picture Frame

Like other reviewers, after careful research, I decided to purchase this product. It was affordable, received good reviews, and was of bigger size than others in the similar price range. When I received it in mail, I was quite happy: it worked great out of the box and it looked even nicer than what I had expected. The screen was bright and very attractive.

The problems started about three weeks following the purchase. First, the slideshow option (the kind with music) stopped working. Whenever I pushed the slideshow button, the screen would completely freeze and I had to restart the unit in order to use any other function. I thought, no big deal, I would just exchange the frame for another one.

My second unit arrived yesterday. This one, however, started having problems right out of the box. After about 5 minutes into the slideshow, the screen started flickering, than shaking, became completely staticky and finally it re-started automatically. I played it two more times after that, each time with a similar thing happening 10 or 15 minutes into the slideshow.

It is obvious this photoframe has a lot of potential (big, bright screen); unfortunately, the software is very buggy. I checked the Portable USA website and it does not appear that they have any patches that could be downloaded as a fix. I will have to return this unit again, this time for a refund.

My assumption is that this product has received many positive reviews because people like it after they initially open the box. However, I would be curious to learn if others have had a similar experience after several weeks or months of ownership.

My brother bought this frame for his wife about 2 months ago. He liked it so much he suggested we get one for our parents anniversary. So he had it shipped to my home because I'm the family historian and have most of the pictures my folks would want. I selected 2900+ pictures and converted them to 640x480. All 2900+ pics plus 15 Glenn Miller songs fit on a 512MB SD card with about 50MB still vacant. I liked the frame so much I just bought one for my wifes birthday. Really good looking; both the actual frame and the images. I'm a fairly serious digital photgrapher and I didn't think 640x480 resolution could look this good. Looks much better than I expected. Sounds just OK, but about what you'd expect with the size speakers that can fit in something this size.

First, thanks to all of the other reviewers for their comments. A few years ago I began to rely almost exclusively on personal reviews to make my product decisions. I have always been happy with the results and grateful that many mistakes were avoided due to the insightful remarks made by other customers.

I settled on this make/model as it didn't seem to have any software problems, the warranty was for a year, it had a nice design and the resolution (640x480) was sufficiently good. It does offer the capability of playing movies and sound clips, I did not test it for this as my interest was solely in using it as a slideshow viewer (besides I have enough ways of watching movies and/or listening to music without adding another). Owning a digital camera I took more photographs than with film and gradually I realized that the expense of developing and displaying them in nice albums was becoming prohibitive. Also, when pictures are "hidden" in albums they tend to be rarely looked at. My last consideration was buying something that was easy to operate having spent too much time already on other product manuals, simplicity is bliss.

I opened the box and drew the frame out. It was hefty and quite elegantly done in wood with fine matting. The design is clean and pretty well conceived with controls/inputs arranged in a logical manner. I hid the wire by putting the unit on an end table with an outlet right below it. Setting it up was extremely easy and involved connecting it to a power source and hooking up the support "leg" in the back. It comes with a remote control as well with quite a lot of functionality.

If you read forums on digital frames a point often made is that you are better off sizing your pictures to match the frame's resolution. My camera is a Nikon SLR and I shoot in raw format which the frame would not accept (few do) and the aspect ratio was different that the 640x480 resolution. Not a problem. I had to tinker a little to figure out how to crop each picture to the right aspect ratio in Photoshop, then I reduced the size to 640x480, made some cosmetic changes and finally saved it as a high resolution jpeg. 80 photographs took almost two hours but keep in mind I was trying to select the pictures from a larger set for sequential viewing. Some people may just pop the flash card directly in and do no editing whatsoever.

Now it was time for the acid test. I popped in the flash card and turned it on. After a quick introductory screen and beep it started immediately. Very nice. Scrolled through all my pictures with random transition effects,no problems whatsoever. The screen was bright (adjustable), colors vivid (also adjustable) and resolution just fine for my needs. Each horizontal picture filled the frame right to the edges, vertical ones had black space to the left and right of them. Needless to say I sat throughout the entire presentation and could not wait to go back and add more photographs. Each picture took up only 200-300K so I could fit around 2,000 on what is now a small 512mb card...perfect. It accepts pictures up to 12mb each but take into consideration that the possible gain in resolution may not be worth the extra space, also I'm not sure if transitions will be as smooth with very large files.

Why a 4 out of 5? Given the technology we have today I don't see why a 1024x768 display isn't possible (is the cost differential that high?), even though 640x480 was plenty for me. The market appears to be disjointed right now with no clear winner in the field to compete against, this may be part of the reason. The manual was a trifle short on details though the controls are quite intuitive. Small issues nonwithstanding, it works for what I intended it to do, clearly some thought went into this product.

The size is ideal for me as I believe anything larger may overwhelm, unless hung on a wall. The rear of the monitor does not stick out much and is discreetly black. An excellent value, produces instant results and looks tasteful to boot. Thumbs up.

I conducted a great deal of research prior to purchase. Based on my experiences with Amazon.Com and their return policies, I decided to go with Portable purchased from Amazon (great return policies). I was not dissapointed in the product.

I will not go into an in-depth technical review as most people are not looking for that. I purchased this frame on July 2, 2007 and have had it running non-stop since about July 5, 2007 (24 hours a day). Pictures look great, brightness is excellent, colors are not washed out, and no dead pixels!. Pictures should be scaled in an editor prior to upload- but it is not necessary.

The only fucntion I would like to see on the frame is a timer. I would like to have the frame go on and off at certain times. Other than that, I am about to buy my second Portable Digital Frame.

Whereas I'm not one to take the time to write reviews on products, I felt compelled with this experience.

I purchased this product because it married a number of functions I was looking for: size of display, ability to play music over a slideshow, and movie playback support. The product meets expectations on all three. My only reason for giving the product four stars instead of five is as follows:

Picture quality: while very good, and more than acceptable to many I'm sure, it is a bit shy of a 5: even with some tweaking, the blacks (most noticeably on the bars that come up for vertical pictures) seem a bit milky.

Craftsmanship: the frame looks great: the wood finish is convincing, the matte adds a nice touch. Closer inspection reveals - again - not quite 5 stars: the electronics component of my frame is slightly off center of the matte and frame.

Features: As one reviewer noted, there is no direct USB cable interface - so no plugging the frame directly into the computer. Better have a media card reader if you want to add music, for example. Note movie playback is possible when movies are encoded in the DIVX format only. Also, no battery support - would be a nice touch.

Now - for the reason why I felt compelled to write the review: CUSTOMER SERVICE. When I received the frame, I couldn't get the musical slideshow option to work. Another reviewer mentioned the same thing. Online support is very very lean - they pretty much just offer the manual under the FAQ for this frame. On a lark, I shot off an email to customer support. I was shocked when I got a reply within a few hours. My email exchange with JOHND was phenomenal - he was incredibly helpful, kind, and tireless. His responses were always swift. This has been BY FAR the best customer support I've had in YEARS. In this area I would easily give this company 6++ stars if I could.

To answer the poster above, and to pass on the good karma, I managed to solve the musical slideshow problem (and have requested customer service to post on their website):

Whereas with this product you can place photos in a FOLDER on the inserted media, for the slideshow to play with music, the MUSIC must be placed IN THE ROOT LEVEL of the media (i.e. NOT in any folders). Once I did this, everything worked like a charm. When I had my music files in another folder (like my photos), the frame would freeze and crash under the musical slideshow option - just like the poster above mentioned. I do not know if the same holds true for movies as well, but I do know that treating them as I do the music files has posed no problem.

Hope this helps - I can say that watching a slideshow with music in the background on such a large display is fantastic. And all things considered, well worth the price. Best wishes to Portable USA for a successful future... minor tweaks on this product with such a level of customer service, and they've got a home run.