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(More customer reviews)Ordered the Sony DPF-VR100 after doing some research and reading some reviews. Pretty new, so not a ton of reviews. I guess I took a leap of faith since it had everything I was looking for in a digital frame - widescreen format, large internal memory, fairly high resolution, video playback, power on/off options, and more.
When it arrived, I immediately powered it up. I'm not a manual kind of guy - I like jumping in and seeing how easy things are. This frame was both easy to get up and running, as well as needing some further work/reading/playing with. First off, plugging the frame directly to my laptop resulted in nothing happening - no pop-up on what options I wanted for this device, no format request, nothing. So I took my 32gb SDHC card and moved photos from my laptop onto the card, and plugged the card into the frame. Bingo! The frame recognized the card, the photos and I was off and running. So a few trials with the menu and the 'import images' option was found easily enough. I started the import of 557 images onto the internal memory, and it took roughly 20 minutes? All the photos were fullsized, untouched images from my camera. Anyways, After they were transferred I started the slideshow (super easy with the remote!) and enjoyed the pics for a bit. Then, on a whim, I plugged it back into my laptop and this time I got the popup asking what I wanted to do with the external drive. Not sure why, but after I moved the photos the frame became available as an external drive when connected via USB. In looking at the files on the frame, every one was now in the 256kb size range instead of 1-4mb, so the frame resized them according to the longest side. I hadn't noticed any major changes in the photos, so the resizing was done pretty well. I do plan on resizing the photos by hand, so that I can get a true 1024x600 size to fill the frame completely - not all of them are end to end, there are some black bars to fill space. But that's due to the 4:3 nature of some of my photos.
Next came video... one of the biggest reasons I got this frame was for video playback. I have a number of video files that would be cool to display on this, from a few different sources. I wanted to try using a flash drive for this, so I grabbed 3 different flash drives... 2gb, 8gb and 32gb to see how they work. The first, the 2gb, did not show up. As soon as I plugged it in I got an error message saying it was unrecognized. So I tried the 8gb - same thing. Then the 32gb... same thing. Crap... I found an older 256mb drive in my drawer, and lo and behold, it worked. But size could not be a factor these days... could it? So I did a little looking - and found ONE difference. The older drive was FAT32, and all my other newer ones are NTFS formatted! I reformatted the 8gb into FAT32 and BINGO! Worked fine. So if anyone finds a USB flash drive will not work with this, check the formatting... FAT32 is needed it would seem. Once I found that, it recognized the drive and displayed the images on the drive... or rather the video! WOOHOO! But when I tried to import the video onto the internal memory, I was not able to - something about unable to import.I guess it tries to resize them too? But connecting the frame directly to my laptop via USB was easy, and I was able to move the files into a new folder on the drive. It was SLOW tho... really slow. I usually get 30MB/second in USB transfers but this was in the realm of 1.5MB/second.
But... when I tried to PLAY the first video, a .MOV shot with a Kodak Easyshare camera, it was an unrecognized format. Then I tried an AVI, same message. Uh oh. Then I tried a .MP4 shot from my GoPro Hero HD - and it played beautifully. So I tried running the videos thru Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 10 Suite, converting them to MP4 and voila! They all play fine now. Kind of a pain to need that step, but I may investigate further and see what does/does not play. With all the codecs and options in videos, I'm not surprised some won't play (see all the options within Vegas Studio when rendering... can be very confusing!)
Finally I added some new music to the frame for background during slideshows... I imported them just fine, but it took a little bit to find out that I had to go in and manually add them to the playlist. The photos you add are automaticall thrown into the slideshow, so I expected the music to be as well. But, it is just a few steps in the menu to do so, once you realize it. The music is pretty good for what it is... a photo frame. It won't win any audio awards with the quality, but it does the job well enough. I ended up turning off all the music on the frame as it got to be a bit much.
Other options in the menu are pretty nice - there is an easy setup for the auto on/off, or a more advanced if you want multiple on/offs daily. Plus clocks, photo shuffle, photo display times (3, 7, 20 seconds, 1, 5, 30 minutes, 1, 3, 12 or 24 hours), and multiple ways to have the slide show... one at a time, tiled, artsy, and others. Even a single photo display like a 'normal' photo frame. And the remote is super handy - don't even bother with the buttons on the back of the frame. Another nice feature is an auto-rotate depending on the frame orientation - landscape or portrait.
So all in all, I'm really happy and impressed with the frame. The display quality is very good (to me), the sound is pretty good (altho disabled now), and there are lots of options for display. It looks nice, and one of the buying points for me was that there is no matte between the image and the physical frame. It has a nice rod that screws in the back to make it into a desktop frame, as well as all the mountings for a wall - I'm using it on a desktop as I don't want the power cord hanging down the wall. The quality of the construction seems to be well done, but we'll see after the dogs invariably knock it over on the desk a few times.
If you're looking for a 10" digital frame, with the option to do video... in my opinion this is a frame that would be hard to beat (as long as you don't mind tweaking the video some)
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Sony DPF-VR100 10.2-Inch WSVGA LCD (16:10) Digital Photo Frame (Black)Beautifully display your pictures and AVCHD videos with the easy-to-use 10.2"1 LED backlit digital photo frame. Store up to 4000 of your favorite photos. Enjoy photo slideshows with music. Playback stunning panoramic images taken with your Sony camera
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