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

A wonderful product that I wanted to buy for my family friend. I hope I got for the best price with good features like WiFi, remote etc.

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.

I had this thing opened and set up on my wireless network to shared photo / video / music folders within fifteen minutes. All pretty straightforward I thought. The internal speakers are naturally pretty small and weedy, but it does have a headphone output (minijack) which I used to plug into some better speakers and was able to stream music files from my hard drive wirelessly too (at the same time as pulling images wirelessly) .. I'm reckon the streamed audio is a bit hissy but as I haven't played around with that part much yet it might just be I'd selected a batch of slightly hissy audio files (doubtful, but possible maybe?) to try it with. The overall finish is a bit 'cheapy plastic' to the touch (which is mostly where it loses the fifth star from me).. but it LOOKS quite acceptable (and you aren't going to be touching it much). There is a row of small control buttons on the top, not visible from the front .. but you'll probably not use them much as the remote is very useable - there is a little clip in the packaging which fits to the rear of the unit that the remote can slip into (so you don't lose it .. as it is pretty dinky). It's worth reading the instructions to make sure you 'get' the remote functions. I didn't at first (believing, as I do, that if it needs an instruction book at all, a gizmo is not user-friendly enough) but a quick check of the rather impressively thick book (lots of different languages) put me right.

Overall, the resolution and display is fine for the purpose, sufficiently bright and colourful without over doing it. I notice there are some tweakable controls (brightness and the like) hiding down in the menus if you feel the need .. so far I've left pretty much alone. You can even zoom in on the image a couple of steps and pan around .. if you should want to.

It does seem to have problems with a handful of my image files .. which it refuses to display. Not sure quite yet what the problem is .. might be they are too large (having been fiddled with in Photoshop maybe?) but it seems happy with most stuff.

Setting a folder in Windows Media is easy and the frame found the folder immediately. I might experiment with batch file resize of photos I want to display down to the 800x480 pixel count - as large file sizes do take a while to stream over to it. The built in transitions are ok, though it would have been nice to have a 'fade' option to create more 'subtle' transitions. It plays video clips quite adequately .. I dare say with a bit of experimenting it might even be able to stream full movies across from the hard drive (if one has the software available to be able to create such things) and the screen's probably just about big enough to cope with that as a 'spare' screen. I bought an 8Gb card to use .. as I did read the wireless stuff was a bit fragile .. but so far, I have found it to have a perfectly acceptable connection. So I might use the card for something else!

The Kodak Easy-Share software is ok, though I was surprised it didn't have a facility to connect that software to the frame (at least not anything I've found thus far). Instead you head for Windows Media Player (v11+) as the easiest method of getting your images over. As Kodak have Easy-Share software bundled in with the frame it seemed a bit of a missed opportunity from a usability point of view that the software couldn't see the frame as a 'connected device'. The frame can find your normal shared 'My Music', My Pictures' etc., folders in Windows and you can wander through the folders on your PC relatively easily from the frame itself just using the remote.

I would be less impressed at the original RRP of £230 Amazon claim this was (particularly with the quality of plastic used), but for less than half that, with various media card slots built in (no memory stick though .. which is a bit of a shame as my digital camera is a Sony!), wireless, audio streaming and a half decent display I think it's good value for money .. If, after playing with this for a few days I am still impressed, I might even buy another one.

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

The picture quality of this product is OK but the software is staggeringly poor- there is no option to play photos at random or to resume where you last were. The result is that it insists on starting with the same photo in a slide show and then following the same order every time- unless you have it running 24 hours, you'll never get to the last photos in the list. For me these faults mean it's not really worth having.