Home > Consumer Reviews > Kodak EasyShare M820 Digital Picture Frame with Home Decor Kit

If, like me, you want your video clips to fill the entire screen of this frame (like it does with stll photos), rather than add in the black vertical borders, please feel free to email me for a solution at andynetter AT hotmail DOT com]. I've spent many hours trying to find a solution for this (Kodak were no help by the way!) and now that I've found one I thought it fair to share it. I will edit this post with step-by-step instructions when I have time to type them.

Overall, great frame, really cant complain about anything. The iPhone-style finger-swiping to flick between pictures using the touch screen is very cool! Highly recommended prodct, shame about Kodak's rubbish customer service.

I was so excited when I received this for Christmas -- all I did was throw some pictures and music onto a jump drive, plug it into the back of the frame (where it doesn't show) and I had an instant slide show set to music! Forget the software that comes with it. Later I tried to use their software and it was horrible...but you don't need it! While the slide show was playing I played with the controls on the front of the frame (which don't even show when you are not touching it)and it took about 1/2 hour to figure out all of the different options etc. Overall, this was very easy to use and looks great having different mat color options.

I got this as a Xmas present today. I'm a computer expert. I can't believe how problematic the software is with this frame.

The picture quality is actually very good compared to others I've purchased. I like that it takes multiple types of memory cards and it is a very nice looking frame. However, I couldn't get my computer to see the internal or external memory cards no matter what I tried. I finally gave up on it and just downloaded the pictures directly to my SD card. Kodak brags that it has 128MB of internal memory. Big deal! You can buy a 2 GB SD card for less than $10 these days. When will manufactures of electronic stuff quit being so cheap with the internal memory? I can't use it anyway because I can't access it from my computer.

The navigation controls on the outside of the screen is a nice idea, but it is not intuitive to learn. Once I got the hang of it I was fine, but believe me - this is not how to do human engineering.

Now for the bad part. The software took about 1 hour to install on my very fast computer. Most of the time was downloading the outdated software that came with the CD. I actually thought it had stalled once or twice. I don't think I have ever seen software take so long to load. Once the bloated software was loaded it failed to recognize my computer. Then it started locking up on me.

I spent pretty much the entire afternoon messing with this thing not believing I couldn't get this to work. Surely it can't be this difficult to link to my computer? I must be doing something wrong? (I thought) If I was, I couldn't figure it out! (I updated firmware, uninstalled the software and reinstalled, changed the order of putting in the USB cable, rebooted the computer lots of times, looked at Kodak's website for help - which was useless!)

BTW, the box says it comes with a USB cable but it doesn't. Nice touch Kodak! The very poorly written manual tells you this. (Maybe Kodak should fix this on their box?) And...if you are lucky enough to have a double flat male USB cable on hand, (which isn't common at all )it still won't work. It also has a fire wire connection which I didn't try because I didn't have that cable.

Folks - this is bad engineering in my book. How does Kodak stay in business making products like this? I understand from others that the previous model was even worse.

IMO this is a very poorly designed product. Too bad, it could have been an outstanding one if someone would have taken the time to write a simple software interface to it. Heck, I would have been happy just to transfer files directly from my PC to the internal and external memory on the display.

I haven't decided if I'm going to keep it yet or not. I give it two stars because it wasted so much of my time this afternoon and I'm still mad about that. :)

KODAK ARE YOU LISTENING? probably not....... :(

Picture quality settings and size are realy good.Only problem after couple days very fine black lines apeared.Item was returne with no problem.

We researched digital photo frames and thought this one was the best one in this price range; we are quite happy with it. We would purchase it again. It was a little difficult to go through all the choices it had but practice makes perfect and we finally "got it" and now we love it!