Home > Consumer Reviews > Kodak Easyshare 10" Wi-Fi Digital Picture Frame

I had one of these frames for Xmas. Whilst it can display good pictures and passable sound it has many faults. It can take hours to set it up for use as the 2 supplied manuals conflict in instructions. The Wi-fi on mine only partly works - the frame picks up the signal from my router but it cannot see my laptop! There are no instructions on how to delete a music file. The file sharing software will not work because "Media Player 11" will not allow file sharing. Also, the media player cannot "see" the Frame. (I have to use a USB connection to link the Frame to the laptop.) The batch of pictures on a SD card show up as a certain number of pictures but only about 3\4 of them actually display. Twice I emailed the Kodak help desk, but they did not reply

One star for great image quality.

Wireless setup was a nightmare (needed extensive troubleshooting and patches).
Printed and online tech support was poor.
Wireless reliability was poor.
PC software installation was excessive.
Jpeg compatibility was poor.
Built-in software was poor.

Returned. Don't buy one.

I already have a Philips digital frame and I - wrongly - assumed that setting up the Kodak would be as straightforward. After many frustating hours I discovered that I did not have the latest firmware. Downloading that helped a lot: I could at least then transfer photos from pc to frame. The next great discovery was that to view photos on the frame, you must first disconnect it from the pc.
None of this is mentioned in the manual - the basic problem seems to be that the Easyshare Digital Frame is an afterthought: it looks as though they developed the Easyshare system as a competitor to Photobox, the concept being that you upload photos from your pc to cyber storage (the Kodak Gallery) and then buy loads of prints. Then they thought it would be a good idea to add a digital frame to the system. But when they added on the frame, they forgot/did not bother to integrate the two when it came to writing the manual. So the frame manual relates only to the hardware and the software instructions don't mention the frame. (Apart from which, I for one really don't want to buy a lot more prints when I can have the same photos on permanent slideshow on my desk).
Now that it is set up, it runs nicely and the screen is fine. The only aggravation now is that when a slideshow is running (without wifi) there is mild interference on my wifi tv.

As others have commented this could have been a world class product if Kodak had taken more time with the firmware. It lacks two major features - random play of photos and auto resume at switch on. The Wi-Fi is easy to set up but drop outs are frequent. This results in the frame re-starting and, if you are using it to stream photos via Wi-Fi, it will sit at the opening menu until you use the remote to navigate back to 'play slide show' (8 button presses!). It starts at the beginning of your picture library again so you get to see the same pictures fairly often - I have never been able to get it to stream photos over my network reliably for longer than about 6 hours without a re-start. When it works picture quality is excellent so I strongly suggest you buy the non Wi-Fi version (SV1011) and order an 8Gb SDHC card with the money you save. The latter will hold over 3,000+ pictures so network streaming is not necessary. You will have to leave the digital frame permanently on however as re-starting it will mean going through the menu options and starting the slide show at the beginning again. Perhaps Kodak will release some new firmware to overcome these deficiencies. If it does this will be the best digital frame on the market

I was almost put off buying this because of people saying it was difficult to use especially over wi-fi. Firstly let me establish the fact that I'm not very computer literate and have had all sorts of problems setting up wireless products in the past, but setting up and using this frame was really, really easy. There are two ways of getting your pictures wirelessly to the frame either via windows media 11 or the KODAK easyshare website, you are walked through the set up for both using the supplied CD and manuals. Personally I found the KODAK easyshare gallery the easiest way as I don't use windows media to organise my photos. The pictures look great on the frame and the remote and on screen menus are very easy to use. Don't be scared of this frame it's realy good value for money and does a fantastic job.