Kodak EasyShare W1020 10-Inch Wireless Digital Frame

Kodak EasyShare W1020 10-Inch Wireless Digital Frame

Kodak EasyShare W1020 10-Inch Wireless Digital Frame
Binding: Electronics
Manufacturer: Kodak
Product Description:
View your pictures on the 10 in. (25.4 cm) 16:9 wide screen featuring KODAK Color Science for vibrant color and crisp detail.Kodak's Quick Touch Border includes an illuminated panel of yellow lights along the border of the frame that tells you exactly where to touch - simply touch along the bottom and right hand side of the border of the frame to navigate menus.View news, weather, and sports updates to stay informed throughout the day, plus humor, horoscope, sports, traffic, and more - powered by Framechannel.
List Price: USD 365.87
Lowest New Price: USD 197.00
Price is accurate as of the date/time indicated. Prices and product availability are subject to change. Any price displayed on the Amazon website at the time of purchase will govern the sale of this product.
Average Rating:
Features:
  • 10-inch high quality LCD with 16:9 aspect ratio; KODAK Color Science gives your pictures crisp details and vibrant colors
  • Wireless access to pictures on your home computer and leading photo sharing sites featuring Kodak Gallery and Flickr with built-in Wi-Fi capability
  • Play your videos or listen to your favorite MP3’s with the frame’s built-in speakers.
  • Store up to 4000 of your favorite pictures directly on your frame’s 512 MB of internal memory
  • 2 SD card slots are available to allow you to have extra memory to view more pictures
Brand: Kodak
Model: W1020
Languages:
Original Language: English
Customer Reviews


Buggy Software, features not fleshed out, not easy to configure (nice photo display though...)
I own the 10" wireless version. I installed the latest firmware as of 1/6/2009 and the latest software update for the PC software.

If you have a secure network, then you will run into firewall issues between the PC and the Frame if you want to "Drag and Drop" photos from your PC to the Frame, or if you want to serve up photos to the frame from your PC (client/server mode - your PC has to be on all the time to serve the photos).

If you are firewall saavy then you might not have too much trouble. Kodak doesn't tell you which ports it wants open (other than all of them). And "allowing" the PC application that comes bundled with the frame to have free access through the network doesn't always seem to work (I had to shut McAfee firewall down, even though I allowed the Kodak software an exception... on my other computer with Windows firewall the exception worked fine... except with pairing the frame with FrameChannel, see below... and I'm still not sure how I got that working).

FrameChannel setup is difficult at best. It requires some luck and magic. You have to pair the Frame to your PC, then access FrameChannel from the Web UI or PC App that comes bundled with the frame, then click on the FrameChannel logo and set up/log into your account. I did this 500 times but the frame would not pair. I'd use the frame interface (which has more config options than the web interface for the frame) and select FrameChannel, and the Frame would tell me it was not connected to the network, and to go to settings > network and connect it to the network, even though I could ping the Frame, and the web UI worked fine at the same time it was telling me it was not on the network! I finally got it to work, somehow, after many reboots of the frame, wall-punching, firewall tweaking, cursing, etc. The instructions are not clear to say the least. If the frame pops up a validation code then you know you are almost there. If I could retrace my steps of finally getting the frame paired with FrameChannel, I would explain it here, but I tried so many things over so many hours I'm going to chock it up to luck.

Come to find out, the FrameChannel service has a bunch of ads it likes to show on your frame. I wouldn't bother with FrameChannel, save yourself the grief. My wife looked at it and said "It's like we are at a bank waiting in line, you see some photos, a news headline, the weather, an advertisement...". I don't know about you, but I don't want to see advertisements in my living room.

(Note: Yes, I'm bitter about the whole framechannel configuration issues I had. I am a programmer and I work on enterprise networking software... wireless, wired, VOIP, SIP, Video, etc. I configure that stuff for a living. A Kodak frame should be a cake walk, right? Needless to say I wouldn't buy this for someone with limited computer experience if they wanted to use FrameChannel).

The PC software that comes bundled with the frame will crash a lot. It will bring a modest laptop with decent computing power to its knees as it searches your harddrive for photos. It also doesn't tell you it is searching your hard drive for photos, and you may wonder why your PC slowed down so much right after you installed the software... if it didn't crash. If the software crashed then your PC will run just fine.

If you have a uPnP AV server (universal plug and play), this frame will see it, but will then freeze/lock up and you will watch a little hourglass spin until you reboot the frame. It will happen over and over again. I had to turn off the uPnP AV server on my D-Link 323 NAS or the frame would keep freezing up. uPnP support is not listed as a supported feature, but it is not listed as a limitation either.

What I hoped I would be able to do is "easily" create multiple slide shows and RSS feeds and have the Frame randomly pull photos from all those streams of photos. You can't do that really.

You can upload a bunch of photos to the Frame, and use those as a slide show. You can configure multiple slideshows, but you can only watch one at a time, if you want a different slide show then you have to get up, walk to the frame, push the magic buttons, and select a different one. (You cannot change the shows from the Web UI, you actually can't do a whole lot from the web UI...) Now, walking to the frame isn't really a big deal, but come one... the Frame is a computer for all intents and purposes. Why can't you mix and match a bunch of different photo streams "easily"?

If you want to watch a photo feed from Flickr, then you have to walk up to the frame, select the flickr feed, then let it play.

Granted, you can use FrameChannel to mix and match feeds and photos that you upload to FrameChannel, but you will get some ads, and you can't mix and match those with photos you uploaded directly to the frame. I already have a ton of photos servable from my home network. I don't want to upload them someplace else, so they can then be sent down from the internet back to the frame. Mix and match of photo streams is not easy with this frame.

The web UI is limited as I said before. You can do some configuration, but you can't switch slide shows, etc. You need to do all that from the frame itself. You should be able to do everything from the frame and from the web UI. Scrolling through images or entering text on the frame is a major pain. Using the bundled software is a bigger pain.

If you are really tech saavy you can get it to do what you want. What I ended up doing was reconfigured my DNS-323 NAS as a web server, wrote some PHP scripts that generated RSS feeds for any photos that I or my wife throw into some folders (also on the NAS), then configured the frame for a single RSS feed, which points at my NAS. I can even tie in some Flickr RSS feeds if I want, or some basic news/weather feeds, etc. I don't have to upload any photos anyplace other than the NAS box, and I don't have to see ads from FrameChannel. So... I pretty much had to code up my own version of FrameChannel. Which was fun to be honest, but not how I planned to spend an evening. If you are not a programmer, and don't have a network backup box that is on all the time anyway that can serve up the photos... you may want to walk away from this one.

But, if you just want to copy some photos to the frame and that's it, or just use it for your Kodak Gallery pictures, then this is a great(but pricey) frame. 4 stars, 5 if it were cheaper.

If you want to use all the bells and whistles. Get ready for some frustration. 2 stars. Maybe 3? No, not after the FrameChannel fiasco. 2 stars.

I'm looking forward to some firmware updates to say the least :) Maybe they will fix some of the usability issues. Maybe not.


Excellent product
I have the P720 and it is excellent also. Right out of the box slipped in my SD chip from my camera, turned on the unit, and instantly saw the slide show. Fantastic gift. Due to cost and ease of use I highly suggest this item to all my friends. The only feature not on this inexpensive unit is the fact that you need to group pictures so they display all horizontal or portrait depending on which way you hang/display the photo frame. But that feature was not important to me as I wanted an excellent product at an inexpensive cost and that is exactly what I got! Nice job Kodak!


Great frame, but sub-par software
I like this frame a lot. It's constructed really well and my photos look great on it. The onboard controls are good enough and they disappear gracefully when not in use. The frame supports all kinds of memory cards as well as a USB port for a thumb drive. And of course it supports Wi-Fi which is terrific. I have it downloading pictures from my Picasa Web Albums.

Unfortunately, the software that comes with the frame is not very good. It runs really slowly and is not very intuitive. That's not devastating because I decided to use Kodak's framechannel.com site to configure feeds for the frame. It's not great, but it works much better than the software. With either one, the menus and work-flow are frustrating at best.

The bottom-line : It works great for displaying photos loaded on a memory card or on a computer in my house. But it falls short of reasonable expectations when used to display photos from the internet.


MAC user - DO NOT BUY THIS FRAME
I bought this digital frame because it has been advertised as being compatible with macs on a number of web sites. It is not - software is not included in the packaging for macs and their website does not offer the "digital display software" needed for all the functions to work on a mac platform - you are paying for wireless capabilities that will not work!!! I am extremely disappointed. I tried calling the 800 number- I was on the hone for 49 plus minutes and got NO where. I suggest buying a much much cheaper digital frame from any other company - you are not getting what you pay for in this product.


7 inch frame: Great frame, could use better resolution.
This is the review for the 7-in frame, since Amazon has yet to figure out that they need distinct reviews for each distinct model (hello, Amazon?).

Fantastic aesthetics on the frame, my wife and I were impressed, and my mother-in-law was even more impressed when she unwrapped it for Christmas. The frame is beautiful, and the red matte contrasts perfectly between the dark frame and white touch border.

The software on this frame is awesome, once you get used to the touch border and how to use the controls. This software seriously saved my keester. Story:

I neglected to order a SD card reader for the extra SD card I had laying around and planned to use for this frame, since I figured my wife's camera would have no trouble allowing us to transfer pictures from her computer onto the blank SD card if it is was in her camera. I was wrong, and the camera only let you transfer photos from Camera-to-PC, and not PC-to-Camera. Of course, being the master of procrastination that I am, I had waited until Christmas Eve to figure this out. My wife was unhappy with me, and all the nerd knobs in my brain started turning to devise a solution.

Alas, I found a USB memory stick with enough space to store the photos, but it was so long that it stuck out beyond the frame. Great. Remember how I said the software saved my keester? Guess what folks, once I had the USB stick and the SD card plugged into the frame, the software built into the frame allowed me to copy the photos from the USB stick over to the SD card. Kodak, me and my keester thank you.

All-in-all a really well built frame. In a non-widescreen format, and a bit sharper resolution, this frame would be a perfect 5 stars. As it stands, the frame will either "windowpane" photos, or automatically zoom in on them to fill the screen but then you can't control the cropping that occurs. Of course, you can manually crop in an image editing program, but if you're buying for someone who is not computer savvy, you probably want to remain as hands-off as possible, and preferably just have them dump their digital photos to the SD card and go. The resolution doesn't lend itself well to close-up inspection, or to capturing vivid detail in images (did that hummingbird have 3 eyes?), but it's inexpensive if you catch the right deal, and it looks great from across the room.

Mother-in-laws everywhere need one of these, or a bigger brother of it.

Product Information and Prices stored: January 6, 2009, 4:13

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