I've been framed!

I recently purchased a Kodak EX811 WiFi Digital Picture Frame as a gift for my exceptionally non-technical mother. She'll never own a computer so this was a nice, simple way for her to see our photos that are taken from our digital camera.

The experience was a total disaster. I simply cannot recommend this piece of junk.

First off, the box and all supporting documentation says that the image size is 800x480 pixels. That's a lie. They also say it's a 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio, although that fact is much less emphasized. Do the math. Take 800, apply 16:9, and you wind up with 450 pixels. That's the truth.

I found this out the hard way after cropping 267 photos for this non-standard screen format. Most cameras use a 4:3 aspect ratio resulting in what would be 800x600 pixels. The widescreen format short changes us on the image size and is a lot cheaper for Kodak.

Whatever, the image looked really good in the store, primarily because it has a matt finish compared to many other brand's glossy image that results in lots of reflections. The display was bright and this unit promised to play back videos in MPEG-1, MPEG-4, MOV, and AVI. Bullshit!

Using these standard formats I could manage to get decent video only after much pulling of hair, but absolutely no audio. I have quite a collection of tools to transcode video and the only format that would work with audio was motion JPEG-A, but the image was awful. I could export from EyeTV or iMovie, but could not get anything that worked with both video and audio. I gave up.

But the final straw that forced me to return this turkey to the store was the fact that the claimed 128 MB of internal memory (of which a paltry 100 MB is actually available) could only be filled to about 60 MB before it complained that the disk was full. I tried different copy and sync tools in Mac OS, Windows, and Unix to no avail. The damn thing would only fill to some random amount and then say it was full.

Kodak's implementation of this technology is simply not ready for prime time. And their tech support is a joke. I sent them specific questions asking about what audio/video settings I should use since their documentation is useless. They replied quickly without answering the questions and simply pointed me to the tech sheet.

Stay away from this lame ass piece of junk.