Review: Kodak EasyShare W820 Digital Picture Frame

Written on Nov 24, 2008 by MKowalski and filed under Kodak, Reviews

Until not so long ago, if you had asked most people what Kodak made they probably would have told you “film.” In a market as full of newcomers as imaging is, Kodak is an old hand. They’ve been making stuff for picture taking for more than a century now, but they’ve also led the way into digital pictures with a large collection of feature-rich digital photo frames.

Kodak’s newest entry, the EasyShare W820, has all of the latest conveniences and features common to premium digital frames: wireless network capabilities, multimedia support for pictures as well as videos and audio, and a movie-friendly 16:9 aspect ratio. Even with all of these advantages, however, a steep price tag means the W820 will have to work a little harder to prove its value to consumers.

It’s also worth noting that Kodak makes a larger version of the W820, called the EasyShare W1020. The W1020 digital picture frame is essentially the same frame as the W820. As a result, this review will will largely address the W1020 as well.

Kodak EasyShare W820 Specs

• 8” LCD (16:9 aspect ratio, 800×480 resolution)
• 512MB internal memory
• Supports SD, MMC, MS, xD, CF external memory
• USB and mini USB connections
• Wi-Fi connectivity, with content from FrameChannel and Flickr
• Kodak Quick Touch Border
• Audio/video playback (MP3, AVI, MPEG, MOV)

Design and Build

Right off the bat, I liked the looks of the W820. It’s somewhere between the modern-styled “gadget” frames like the Samsung that recently spent time on my desk, and more conservative digital frames that work hard to look like “old fashion” picture frames. The W820 embraces its high-tech nature in its styling without being completely dominated by it. Its wide aspect ratio and lack of glass in front of the display mean you probably won’t be able to pass it off as a regular photo frame, but it’s not going to stick out like a sore thumb in homes or offices that aren’t modernist or minimalist either.

One minor complaint about the W820 is that while the outer faux wood frame is removable/replaceable (although other bezels aren’t included), the plastic material used in this application does a less convincing impersonation of wood than many competitive models. Otherwise, though, the all-plastic frame is lightweight but reasonably well put together.

Kodak did a particularly nice job with the frame’s wide-based, rubber-padded swiveling desktop stand.

If desktop use isn’t your thing, the W820 provides three nail recesses, allowing either landscape or portrait wall-mount orientation in this mounting arrangement as well. There’s also a threaded socket on the back of the device that appears designed to receive a tripod or other stand mount – a great feature for commercial use.

In addition to its removable bezel, the outer area within the two-level mat around the W820’s display is designed to receive one of several available colorful inserts, creating a simulated “double mat” look around the frame. Kodak includes two mats that go nicely with the frame’s cream colored inner mat, and you can buy other colors from Kodak to match room decor or suit your mood.

Interestingly, the plastic accent mats have an adhesive backing for mounting to the display surface. This does raise some concerns about how easily they can be taken up and reapplied, but Kodak notes that if you store the mat on its provided backing paper when not in use, the adhesive should stay good and strong. And after nearly two weeks with one of the mats in place, it was still easily lifted up and left no discernible sticky residue. The concept of “mat stickers” is a little strange, but in practice everything seems to work fine.

One thing you won’t find on the W820 is many buttons. That’s because the entire inner mat surrounding the display is made up of a series of touch-responsive panels, which serve as “soft buttons” when accessing the frames menus and options.

I’ll discuss how, and how well, this control arrangement works momentarily.

Besides volume and power buttons on the top of the frame, rest of the W820 thin inner display area behind the bezel is covered with two memory card readers, mini and full-size USB ports, and even a pair of audio jacks – one for headphones, the other labeled “Audio In.”

I was never able to figure out exactly what purpose the Audio In connection serves, and the user’s manual doesn’t appear to provide any clues. Input for a karaoke microphone, perhaps?

Memory/Picture Sources

The W820 has enough internal storage (512 MB) to host up to 4000 compressed/resized images according to Kodak. Getting files to this memory is accomplished through the frame’s two card readers – a Compact Flash slot, and a multi-card reader for SD, xD, and MS memory – or one of its USB connections (one for hosting thumb drives, and a mini USB port for connecting directly to a PC).

Insert a memory card or connect a drive and the W820 begins playing the new images from external sources immediately. Tap the “Actions” tab at the bottom of the display and the W820 gives you the option to copy single, selected, or all images from a particular external source to the frame’s memory.

Images from the frame’s internal memory pop up quickly, but the whole device can lag more than a little bit when moving images from a card or making selections from external picture sources. Video playback from cards or drives is also dodgy, with lots of stuttering experienced when trying out some sample MPEG movies (as a note, the W820 supports MPEG, AVI, and MOV formats). MP3 audio for slideshows worked without a hitch, however.

With WiFi capabilities, the W820 can also find photos and other content from the web. Primarily, the W820 uses the FrameChannel service for its news feeds. The system itself works fine, and you can get news on a variety of topics pulled together by FrameChannel from several sources, including Reuters and the AP. As we’ve commented before about FrameChannel on this site, though, the news bits are short and often trail off in ellipses mid-sentence.

The W820 can also source other content from the web – photos from Flickr, images from RSS feeds, and lots of FrameChannel content beyond the four or five “channels” that come pre-loaded on the W820. In order to configure which FrameChannel content you’d like to see or add other external RSS feeds, you’ll need to install Kodak’s Digital Display software. The W820 prompts you to install the Mac or PC ready software as soon as you configure the frame’s wireless network, but if you skipped that step initially you’ll have to go back and perform before you can really dig into what the W820 offers in terms of web content.

The installation itself went off without a hitch on my computer running Windows Vista, and approximately five minutes after first inserting the install disc I was able to begin changing up the W820’s web content across my wireless network, without having to physically connect the frame to the computer or even be in the same room. Kodak’s software is easy to understand, allowing you to switch up FrameChannel content or associate the frame with feeds from Flickr users – those of friends and family, or even your own if you don’t want to bother loading images that you’ve already uploaded into the frame’s memory as well.

The W820 can even pull images from RSS feeds, though this is probably the frame’s weakest web-based technology. The frame can’t read full RSS feeds; it can only display the images from them. And even so, there seem to be some inexplicable issues with the feed reader, allowing the images from some feeds to go through without a hitch while others would cause the frame to hang up indefinitely, requiring a reboot to unfreeze it.

But that little snag aside, what really makes the W820 a winner is the Flickr feed integration. Flickr is almost certainly the most popular photo sharing site out there, and the W820 lets you take full advantage of that popularity by automatically uploading new images from any “Photostream” you’re interested in checking out as soon as they’re added. As I said before, if you’re an avid Flickr user, this may mean that you never have to actually load an image in the frame’s local memory again. Add them to Flickr and they’ll immediately show up on the W820. Obviously, you’ll need a Flickr account to take full advantage of these functions, but since basic Flickr access with a limited number of image uploads per month is free, getting connected there should be no big deal.

I do wish the configuration for all of the W820’s web “stuff” was completely browser-based like on Samsung’s newest Wi-Fi frames, instead of requiring installation of an additional piece of software. But everything else about setting up the W820 was to receive web content was so simple that I was able to quickly overlook this very minor headache.

Display Modes

Compared to what most of their competition is doing, Kodak has kept content playback simple, using the same basic interface for viewing pictures, videos, or web content. Starting up the frame to get there, however, takes more time than I’d like. The W820 has a long, video-style intro screen, and then takes nearly 20 seconds to populate web content before allowing access to the home screen.

The home screen provides single-point access to all of the W820’s display modes for various types of content, making it easier to get to and from playback mode than on most frames I’ve tested.

Once you’re in slideshow mode with images or web feed content, the W820 offers basic options for transitions as well as the duration of each slide. The choices here for slideshows are relatively limited, but this is where Kodak’s software again provides a solution. Digital Display lets you build custom slideshows and load them directly to the W820, providing some options not available directly on the frame itself for customizing your image playback experience.

Other than a stuttering problem when playing large videos from cards, the W820 is an excellent video playback device as well. It offers broad file-type support, meaning you’re unlikely to run into compatibility issues with movies, and audio playback from the W820’s rear-mounted speakers is exceptionally good for a device this size. With its 16:9 display aspect ratio, the W820 is ready for your HD movies as well.

Menu System

The W820, in spite of all of its advanced web content access, actually has fewer basic interface modes than your typical frame with this kind of features. As hinted at above, whether you’re playing videos, viewing web feeds, or looking at images, everything is driven through a variation of the frame’s simple slideshow interface, with a row of playback controls along the bottom of the image, and more global controls for returning to the home screen or accessing options on the side.

Other than power and volume buttons behind the bezel, the soft buttons on the frame’s inner mat – which correspond to changing options on the screen – are the only controls. Moving through lists is mostly accomplished by using the bottom row of buttons as a single slider, letting you slide your finger from left to right to move up and down in a list, for instance (and it’s really not as confusing as it sounds).

The illuminated touch areas disappear when not in use, lighting up only when you tap the edge of the frame to call up a menu.

Kodak’s touch-responsive inner mat is one of the better touch systems on the market. Because you don’t actually touch the screen itself, you avoid fingerprints on the W820’s display. The buttons are sensitive enough to pick up inputs consistently without registering many false double taps as some touch panels are prone to do. I only wish that the entire interface were a little faster. When playing images or videos from cards, especially, or accessing larger images from the web, the W820 sometimes takes up to two seconds or more to respond to inputs.

As I said before, the W820’s home screen provides a sort of “home base” for accessing all of the different kinds of content this frame can serve up. From here, settings changes can be made by clicking on the settings tab (duh!), which takes you to a short list of options. If you’re scared of technology, you needn’t be afraid of the W820, as everything about this device – even at its deepest settings adjustment levels – is clearly presented, brief and to the point, and easy to understand.

The only other particularly noteworthy menu option is the W820’s network settings panel. If the frame detects a wireless network on initial start-up, you’ll be prompted to enter this mode right off; if not, you can always access internet connection options from the settings menu.

Once you’re here, you’ll find another straightforward control panel that allows you to scan for in-range WiFi connections and choose the appropriate one. Assuming your prefered network has security enabled, you’ll have to go through the always arduous process of entering a passkey on a device without a keyboard, but with this hurdle crossed, there’s nothing (in my experience using the frame’s Wi-Fi functions) to suggest that things won’t connect right up without a hitch.

If you do need to do some technical troubleshooting, the W820’s manual configuration menu tab lets you dive into detailed networking configuration options.

Display

The W820 is advertised as an 8″ photo frame, but compared most comparable 8″ models, there’s something different going on with Kodak’s new model. Instead of the conventional 800×600 display, the W820’s pixel count measures 800×480, giving it a unique 16:9 aspect ratio that’s becoming more common among “widescreen” media.

Although it’s common for many media types, the W820’s 16:9 aspect ratio doesn’t always work so well for the 4:3 photos from most digital cameras. Depending on your settings, the frame can scale images to width, but this often cuts off important parts of the picture (like the tops of subjects’ heads). Alternatively, you can set the W820 to letterbox the images, preserving their original aspect ratio by putting putting black edge borders on the images. The trade off with this option is that you only get a 640×480 image displayed, instead of an 800×600 shot as on 8″ standard aspect ratio models.

Similarly, the frame can be set to display images in either landscape or portrait orientation, but the screen’s narrow width in portrait mode makes things a bit awkward. Plus the soft buttons are always oriented for landscape use regardless. Clearly this frame was designed with landscape-only use primarily in mind.

Images displayed on the W820 look sharp, colorful, and lifelike, which is a good thing since there are no controls for tweaking the display. (As it’s definitely a premium frame I would have liked to see some rudimentary color/contrast adjustments at the very least.) Viewing angles are also very good, allowing color-correct viewing from almost anywhere in front of the frame, and even directly to the side of it.

Extra Features

The extensive list of web content sources and options outlined above aside, the W820 is pretty short on extra features. There’s no sensor for powering the device on and off automatically based on light or motion, and no options that I could find for programming start-up and shut-down times. Likewise, the lack of advanced display controls may be seen as a features oversight on a frame with so many unique capabilities otherwise.

Bottom Line

The W820 is not without its quirks, but Kodak has definitely come up with a winning formula with the W820. The amount of content you can get from the web on this frame using its WiFi connection, and the ease with which you can do it, really make the W820 a joy to use. Interface design – both the touch-sensitive soft buttons and the “no nonsense” menu structure – is excellent, clearly superior to the poorly designed, laborious menu systems on most digital frames. A few bug fixes would only help the W820, but even without them this is one of the most handsome, solidly built, and uniquely functional wireless frames currently available. Which makes the Easyshare W820’s price point a little easier to rationalize.

Pros

• Innovative touch interface and clear menus work flawlessly
• Great web content integration from Flickr and FrameChannel
• Wi-Fi connectivity is easy to configure
• Weplaceable mats and frames to match any decor

Cons

• No color/contrast controls for display
• RSS feeds work intermittently
• Have to install Kodak’s software to configure the frame’s web content

4.5 out of 5 stars – Editor’s Chocie

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