Product Description

The Samsung SPF-85V 8-Inch wireless Internet photo frame provides stunning 800x600 high resolution images with an elegent glossy black bezel design. The frame uses 802.11b/g connectivity to easily transfer photos wirelessly from your PC or photo sharing website to the photo frame seamlessly. The photo frame is optimized for use with Windows Live Spaces and users can find a brief tutorial at www.livenowsharenow.com. Additionally, the SPF-85V includes Samsung's InfoLink feature, which offer the ability to receive RSS feeds from USA Today new updates and Frame Channel for over 400 channels of personalizable updates. The SPF-85V also features other Samsung exclusive benefits like UbiSync technology that allows you to use your photo frame as a USB mini-PC monitor and Starlight Touch Button Control. This photo frame also 64MB of internal memory, a rechargeable battery, and support for common memory cards including SD, MMC, MS, XD, and USB memory stick. It makes a great affordable gift for holidays, anniversaries, or any other special occasion. Live Now, Share Now. With the Samsung SPF-85V digital photo frame, its not hard to imagine.

---

Product Details

• Size: 8-Inch
• Brand: Samsung
• Model: SPF-85V
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 1.60 pounds

Features

• 8-Inch Wireless Internet Photo Frame
• UbiSync USB mini PC monitor to use as a secondary display
• 800x600 resolution for detailed images
• InfoLink with USA Today and Frame Channel RSS information service

From the Manufacturer

The Samsung SPF-85V digital photo frame plays video, audio and MP3 music files. You can also use Wi-Fi to easily update your new pictures. Designed to enhance your digital photos, Samsung digital photo frames will change the way you think about picture frames.

Samsung SPF-85V Highlights

Wireless photo frame
Transfer photos from your PC to your photo frame wirelessly. It’s also optimized to use with Windows Live Spaces for easy photo sharing.

High resolution images
With a high resolution of 800x600, your pictures appear crystal-clear.

Samsung auto on/off function
Your photo frame’s power will last longer with Samsung’s exclusive auto-turn off/on function.

Samsung UbiSync PC mini monitor
The SPF-85V does much more than display your photos. You can use it as a second PC monitor with a simple USB connection. (UbiSync Technology)

Samsung Starlight touch button control
Samsung Starlight touch keys are located in the front bezel of the photo frame and provide easy usage and navigation.

Auto rotation
Automatically switch your photos from portrait to vertical layout and vice versa, according to the frame’s position.

---

Customer Reviews

Wireless features aren't well baked, UI is sluggish.
What this frame does well is the basics of getting photos from an SD card or internal memory, and displaying the slideshow. The picture is very clear and colors are bright. No issues there. The problem is that they've sacrificed internal memory (a mere 64MB) so that more of the cost of the device could be dedicated to the wireless features - which is where this product is unfortunately NOT all that well baked.

I tried a variety of different supported methods for having this frame read photos over the network with relatively unsatisfactory results:
1) Reading photos from an MSN Spaces account's RSS feed. This appears to have been broken with a recent change to the Live services, and while the photo albums are visible, the frame doesn't find any photos within the album.
2) Getting photos from a Windows Media Player NSS sharing library. While this worked, the frame was extremely slow to locate computers on the network and even slower to enumerate the photos available on those computers. This made starting a slideshow an excruciating experience.
3) Framechannel - create an account and upload your own pics or link it to your Myspace account, as well as local weather, stocks, and so forth. This actually seems to work reasonably well. However, occasionally the frame would inexplicably lock up trying to retrieve the channel information and would only respond to a hard reboot.

In all cases, the UI can take an unacceptably long time to respond to button presses, with no on-screen indication that the button press was noticed. And the buttons themselves are flat-membrane points on the bezel, which can be a bit oversensitive (or undersensitive) with no tactile feedback.

During one bootup I actually got a Windows application crash dialog and the device needed to be power cycled. That's just downright embarrassing.

All in all, I think you can probably find frames for a similar price with better UI responsiveness and where the added dollars will go to better use, such as additional onboard memory, rather than spending it on some rather poorly baked wireless networking features.

Review for the SPF-85V only
This review is for the 2 SPF-85V 8 inch wireless frames I just bought for Christmas Gifts.

I plan on using the wireless feature of the frames, since I think the biggest issue with photoframes is to keep the images updated, in order to look at them. Many people I know have frames, but after a while don't update them so stop looking at them.

Anyway I bought these specifically since they were wireless and supported RSS feeds to us enable downloading from either Picasa or Flickr.

First I have a Mac at home, so it seemed like a lot of the setup in the manual was geared towards using Windows Live Spaces or similar, so the manual is not very good. I did some google searchs for the frame and found some reviews/blogs that were helpful in my setup.

Initially I struggled thought the setup by trial and error, pressing buttons to see what menu comes up and what each funtion does. So it was time consuming but worked well enough, after 1 hour of playing with it I felt I could navigate through the menus.

To access the RSS feed I had to login to the advanced settings of the screen though a webbrowser. So I typed in the IP address of the screen followed by ":5050" and then the advanced screen came up, the password is "Admin" by default. I went to picasa and uploaded some pictures in an album and was able to get the rss link to be accepted by the frame. Then pictures were downloaded on to the frame okay.

I also tried framechannel and it is working okay for pictures, but RSS feeds are not resized correctly (downloading 16x9 while the frame is 4x3), so I emailed them today asking them to add a 4x3 option for rss feeds.

So overall 4 stars

PROS
- Picture quality is good. Samsung makes the LCD I think and they are known for good LCD displays
- Able to wirless connect to download pictures, news, weather, etc. which is what I wanted to do
- Frame industrial design is nice (black border with pattern. Hidden touch controls

CONS
- Manual is bad, need to search the web to find out how to do things on it
- Controls not intuitive, have to use trial and error
- I wouldn't recommend this product unless you are computer savvy

Alpha Version
First of all, this review is for the Samsung 85V. I've noticed some of the other reviews are not for this product. This is a wireless picture frame with 800 X 600 resolution.

First, the good:
(1) Picture quality is excellent
(2) No obnoxious advertising is present on the frame border as is seen in many competitors
(3) The aspect ratio is 4:3. Photos are virtually all 4:3 aspect ratio. A widescreen frame for photo display makes absolutely no sense... you have to reformat / crop your pictures for these frames.

Now, the bad:
(1) There's a web interface for the frame- you use a web browser on your network that connects to the picture frame. The web interface is horrendously slow and repeatedly "times out" while trying to access the frame.
(2) Windows Live support, the only major photo sharing site "supported" by this frame, is broken. I called tech support, who confirmed this. They blamed it on microsoft changing their interface after the product shipped.
(3) I tried RSS feed support using Google's Picasa, Flickr, and MobileMe. None would work. Samsung tech support couldn't get them working either. FrameChannel does work, but occasionally puts up it's own advertising "picture" into your frame.

Since the whole point of this frame is wireless capability and this is severely crippled, I can't recommend this product. Samsung is on the cusp of a 5-star product here... and perhaps it will be with some well done firmware updates. Here's hoping!