Comments on: Review: Sony DPF-D80

By: Jim

Jim — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 13:25:22 +0000

I have had no problems with images altered in Photoshop as long as they’re saved as jpegs. However, I’m running the frame off of the SD card so the altered image problem may only appear when downloading the images to the frame. I prefer running the frame from SD cards anyway since they’re so cheap and can be switched out for different images faster and easier. The random problem is a different issue altogether and much more annoying in my opinion. “True” random will always show some images more than others. Therefore the frame actually should have been designed not to repeat an image until all images have been displayed in ramdom order. This is an old problem that existed on the original CD changers in the ’80s (Sony included). They would play the same songs over and over again and ignore others until consumers complained enough for manufacturers to design them smarter. I find it impossible to believe that Sony didn’t realize their same mistake of 20 years ago and simply ignored it in the name of cost cutting. Shame on Sony. The random display is next to useless due to their greed.

By: Flosfer

Flosfer — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 22:56:03 +0000

(1) JPG files edited in Photoshop can cause a problem with the DPF-D80 if PS has saved the file using the “Progressive” format option. There is an easy solution. (I’m using PS 7.0 under Windows, but I assume something similar will work with other versions.) If an image does not show up on the D80, then open it on your computer in Photoshop and choose “Save As”. (If you want to use the present file name, you will be asked if you want to overwrite the existing file. Say “OK”.) Then you will be given a “JPEG Options” dialog box. Make sure that the “Progressive” format option is NOT selected. (The “Progressive” option is the cause of the problem.) I use “Baseline (’Standard’)”. Choose whatever Image Quality option you want (I use maximum by default). Click “OK”. Close the file and transfer this new version back to the D80. It should display perfectly. At least, that’s been my experience: “Progressive” JPEGs don’t work on the D80, but “Baseline” JPEGs do.

(2) SONY has some very nice products, but in my experience they have substandard software. The D80 is no exception. Take the way an image is deleted on the D80. Go into Index view, move the arrows until the desired image is highlighted (yellow border around the image). Now on the remote press “Menu”. The system is smart enough to give you a menu useful for the present context, and so one option is “Delete”. (But watch out! The yellow highlighting around your chosen image has disappeared.) Arrow down to that option and press the “Enter” button (the “+” button in the center of the remote). A “Delete” sub-menu comes up. One option is “This image”. But which image is that? Obviously, it is the one you highlighted earlier. Oops! No image is highlighted! You have to hope that you highlighted the correct image. If you’re really confident, then go ahead and select “This image” and press “Enter”. Another dialog comes up: “Delete this image? Yes / No”. Again, no image on the screen is highlighted. So if you don’t remember accurately which image you highlighted, you may be in for a surprise.

By: David Turner

David Turner — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 07:32:05 +0000

How can I view my photos using a USB stick? No USB connection.

By: Juha

Juha — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 22:12:20 +0000

got this working after firmware upgrade… not anymore useless…

By: Juha

Juha — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 20:08:31 +0000

This is completely USELESS device unless somebody wants to pay 100GBP for a clock. I tried to get unedited pictures taken by various cameras – non of them Sony – I did displayed absolutely nothing!

Shame Sony engineers, shame!

By: Colin

Colin — Fri, 08 May 2009 19:43:02 +0000

Steve – tell us which frame you bought which displays altered and scanned images OK

By: Colin

Colin — Thu, 07 May 2009 19:51:59 +0000

Ben
How do you do a frame 800×600 in PhotoShop to lay over a picture? I am dying to try it out to see if it solves the problem,

By: Colin

Colin — Thu, 07 May 2009 19:42:46 +0000

Sorry, Dad, but you will have awful trouble even if you save it as a JPEG. Any edited file stands a chance of not being displayed. Finding this out too late is a real disappointment to me, as I bought the Sony photoframe in order to display family photos taken digitally and scanned in from old snapshots. Can anyone explain why Sony would want to ban this type of image from displaying? Any help gratefully received.

By: Joe

Joe — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 21:53:24 +0000

I have found the same “will not display edited photos” issue on more than one brand / model of these picture frames. I have many hundreds of digital photos and monochrome images from both electron microscopes and digital microfocus X-ray systems. Of course nearly all of these were “tweaked” using Ulead’s PhotoImpact software. I have looked at all of them in may computers and have emailed them to hoards of my customers with no problems at all. That is until I tried to use a digital picture frame. Apparently the problem is quite universal and is caused by the EXIF portion of the file either missing or modified by the photo editing software (i.e. Photoshop or PhotoImpact). My guess is that the designers of these things thought they could get by with what is actually insufficient computing power because they could have easily given these frames the same ability as the aforementioned editors. As an American technologist from the now-defunct US Semiconductor industry, I’d say that the real culprit here is the low degree of caring about true quality now that everything is made in the Far East. In fact, it was very difficult even to find what was causing this problem because the mfrs. seem to want it kept quiet. The word Quality refers to a set of rules that had been honed into something of a science here in the US but, I think now that all of our chip mfg. has gone to the Far East it has been translated into meaning “a meaningless buzzword used for selling cheap junk”. Well now here we are reaping the benefits of all the cheap junk that none of us is allowed to produce. Why don’t we let some Americans produce a properly designed digital picture frame and then nobody will have to tell lies to get millions of them sold. After all, you do get what you pay for.

Thanks.

By: Peter

Peter — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 13:24:02 +0000

Same here – same “random” pictures are showing over and over again. A great part of SD pictures never show up.

Sony need to fix that…

By: Devin

Devin — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 22:59:08 +0000

I’m having trouble with my 9″ unit. For some reason in random mode, it often displays 2-5 images and then starts over on the same first image. What this means is much of the time when on random, the unit is displaying the same image (whatever it decides is first in the random list) I also feel that it chooses some photos much more frequently than others. I have hundreds and hundreds of photos on a 4 gig card, but it seems to prefer a small subset of those, and I know they will all display correctly. Maybe I’m crazy on that, but the first issue definitely exists. It also stopped reading any media, at which point I was forced to return it for repair, I gave Sony the rundown on the random thing. It reads cards again now, but not surprisingly, the random issue is still there. Frustrated. Anyone else?

By: Steve

Steve — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 13:41:36 +0000

I did not get as far as transferring the images to the frame – it wouldn’t even read the edited images off the SD card. Also, the edited pics did retain the exif data but also with the added data that they had been edited in Photoshop.

By: chriss

chriss — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 05:20:15 +0000

For edited images I have found you can transfer the images to the frame via a SD Card.
Edited images transfered by a USB cable for some reason I was unable to transfer and display.

I’ve also found that turning the “Auto Image Orientation” off (not the Auto Display orientation) helps quite a bit as well.
NOTE: Do this only if you orient your pictures after downloading from the camera.

Insert SD Card with pictures. . .
Press the menu button and select the “add to album” feature. After the transfer is complete, press menu again, scroll down to select device and choose internal memory. Power the frame down and remove your card. . .when you power up it should work.

A quick check to see if all of the pictures have trasfered to the frame, at any time, would be to look over the Index feature within the frame. . . – Menu – then scroll to index view.

By: chris

chris — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 05:18:35 +0000

For edited images I have found you can transfer the images to the frame via a SD Card.
Edited images transfered by a USB cable for some reason will not work.

A quick check to see if all of the pictures have trasfered to the frame, at any time, would be to look over the Index feature within the frame. . . – Menu – then scroll to index view.

By: Brian

Brian — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 16:58:07 +0000

I have the same problem (failure of edited photos to display) with a new JESSOPS 15″ and this SONY. It seems these frames need the EXIF embedded data created by all digital cameras but removed by editing using most image editors. I tried using all the different jpg standard (non-progressive) output formats (a dozen including the original standard) but no joy (you can get thumbnails with the early jpg standards but no full image). The nasty thing is that jpg decoders have existed since 30 years and EXIF is a recent development. Why the hell, when a file contains no EXIF, did manufacturers of frames decide to omit the image. So once the EXIF is gone the image is undisplayable. Short of adding manually EXIF data to each file there seems no solution! This EXIF has now spread to all popular image formats so it could eventually be used by copyright fanatics to prevent display of all non tagged (source identifiable) or edited image files.

By: chris

chris — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 03:39:38 +0000

I too am having problems loading photoshop altered images. I edit images in photoshop and save the edited pictures as a jpeg.

By: Peter Ward

Peter Ward — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 20:42:35 +0000

I tested this frame in a shop with Canon and Olympus original digital images and images edited in either photoshop or paintshop pro saved as regular jpegs. All displayed fine on the device in the shop. Also I had scanned images (none of the regular exif info) processed in tiff format in either of the editors, converted to jpegs – and these displayed fine too.

The 4:3 ratio is by far the best aspect ratio (ie as the digital image and best compromise with my 1:1.5 35mm scans compared to 16:9).

Critisisms: missing contrast and colour control. Brightness control is 1,2 or 3. 2 is spot on. 1 or 3 are either stupidly dark or washed out respectively. It needs much finer control for this to be useful.

Buy if you never plan to adjust brightness, colour and contrast. If this is a frame for photographs why exclude this? It means you cannot adjust for ambient luminance and colour.

Verdict – nice screen in just about every respect. Just watch the gotachas.

By: Steve

Steve — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 16:09:27 +0000

They were saved as regular jpegs but the fact that they had been altered by Photoshop was deeply embedded in the exif. I tried 2 different trial exif editors but could not remove this specific data (uneditable). At that point I thought it would be too much $ & effort to continue getting these photos onto the Sony frame and went with a different frame – which displayed all the photos without issues.

By: Ben

Ben — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 07:52:18 +0000

You just have to save the images as JPEGs.I use Photoshop on all the images I put on this nifty frame that resizes them to 800×600 (i.e., that way it uses the least amount of space on the memory card). The frame shows them, no problem.

It’s a great product. My only complaint is that it doesn’t show video files. I didn’t realize that when up and bought a 4 Gb memory card for it. That’s a LOT of photos.

I could just put the hi-res images on there, and that way be able to use the ZOOM IN feature on the remote. That’s what I will do.

Hope ya like the frame. For photo display, it can’t be beat.

By: Brian

Brian — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 18:49:25 +0000

I think the aspect ratio is alone worth going with the D80.

By: James

James — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 08:56:03 +0000

It won’t display progressive jpgs, so when you save edited pictures, make sure that option is not checked. Then it should display jpegs from photoshop (or any other editor)

I bought one as a gift for someone, and loaded my photos onto it. I must say I am extremely happy about the display quality. The colours are vivid, but are not clipped in anyway, and no adjustments were needed as the review says.

I am okay with the fact that it’s an image display only frame. Personally, I am a fan of decoupled designs, and believe in doing one thing really really well. Certainly, Sony delivered in that aspect.

The only complaint I have is the transfer speed on USB. It seems to be USB1.1 instead of 2.0, so copying a large number of photos could take a long while.

Overall, I am really impressed, and would consider getting one for myself.

By: JF

JF — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 00:34:56 +0000

How does this frame compare to the DPF-V900?

I am thinking about buying the bigger brother DPF-D100, but holding it up in the shop, the images seemed less bright and less crisp than on the DPF-V900.

On the other hand, I prefer the aspect ratio of the D series over the V series…

By: Dad

Dad — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 18:16:28 +0000

I’ve been looking to but a digital frame, and this Sony model looks like it has some great features. I think your issue of not being able to display picture files edited in Photoshop is because you are saving in the default Photoshop file format, which many software programs can’t recognize. I believe if you save your edited pictures as JPEGs, you won’t have any problems opening your files. Happy Holidays!

By: Kathy

Kathy — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 07:09:21 +0000

I want to thank Steve Loader for his comment. I tweak every one of the photos I take with Photoshop. It would have been a great disappoint if I had ordered this for Christmas, only to find that we couldn’t use it!

By: Steve Loader

Steve Loader — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 17:10:54 +0000

Based on both this review and extensive other research I purchased the new 10in. version of this frame. I agree that the picture quality was pretty good and the frame was compelling but there was one bad flaw that caused me to return it. It would not display any pictures edited by Adobe Photoshop and so would only display about half my pictures. On the multi-view screen, instead of mini photos it just showed icons of a blank X’d out folders – the manual says this is due to the photos being edited on a computer. These photos would not display in the slide show and caused a randomly longer display of the photos which did display (this is what tipped me off to them not displaying in the first place). I often tweak contrast, brightness, etc. using Photoshop, (as do many others). I don’t know if any other editing software also causes this problem but it did not occur on 2 other frames I tried. ( I ended up with the new Pandigital 10.5 in. Smart Touch frame, which I feel is superior to the Sony in almost every respect).

Sure is hard to buy a good frame though!