Review: Samsung SPF-83V Wireless Digital Photo Frame

(Bruce Lewis) "Oh yeah, seems like everybody was getting one of those at Christmas." That's the first thing I heard when I told someone my wife and I had just bought a digital photo frame. That means I'm a little behind the times. I shouldn't be. I'm in charge of a photo-sharing site. Some digital photo frames can connect to a wireless network and pull photos from photo-sharing sites. I ought to know how well they work with my site.

Now I know: They work well. I also learned a lot about the particular frame I bought, so I thought I'd write it up in the form of a review.

Size and Placement

The whole idea of a digital photo frame is to put your pictures where you'll see them as you go about your day. I'm very proud of ourdoings.com and how you can find old photos with two clicks. But a digital photo frame is better, because the photos come to you. For that to work, the frame needs to be big enough that you don't have to peer in close.

The cheapest digital photo frames with wireless (wifi) capability are puny. Really big frames are expensive. We settled on an 8" diagonal, roughly the size of a 5x7, with 800x600 resolution. We bought a Samsung SPF-83V.

If you buy the same frame, you'll want a shelf, counter or desk to put it on. It isn't made to mount on the wall. If you place it to one side, you'll want it on the right side. I'll explain why later. If you leave it on your desk at work, you might want to secure it with a notebook computer lock.

You need an outlet nearby and a discreet place for the power adapter brick. There's a 6-foot power cord from the outlet to the brick, and then 5 feet of cord from the brick to the photo frame. It draws 9 watts according to my kill-a-watt, and 0 watts when turned off. The same can't be said of all modern electronics.

Setup - Easier Than They Say

If you buy this frame to pull photos from the web, ignore what the instructions say about XP, Vista and Windows Media Player. I'll tell you what to do.

Follow the instructions only as far as getting the photo frame onto your wifi network. When it starts looking for a Windows machine, you can specify one to make it shut up.  Or not.  Whether you do or don't, you can then press the Back button repeatedly until you get to the main menu with a "Settings" option at the bottom. Press the down button until the Settings option is highlighted, then press ENTER. Press the down arrow until you see "Management Web Address" and "Managment Password." Then, using any computer on your network (doesn't have to be Windows), go to the Management Web Address. Use the Management Password to get you in.

Once in, click on the "Web Photos" tab. You'll see a place to input a link to your RSS feed.

How you find your RSS feed will vary depending on where you keep your photos. I'll give you instructions for ourdoings.com.

  1. Go to the page where your photos are.
  2. Click the "Get Updates" tab.
  3. Scroll to the bottom.
  4. Click on the "h.xml" link. Ignore the page that appears. It's made to be read by programs, not humans.
  5. Copy the location (http://ourdoings.com/...) from the top.
  6. Go back to your photo frame's "Web Photos" tab.
  7. Paste that location in.
  8. Go back and do the same with the "v.xml" link.

We Control the Horizontal. We Control the Vertical.

Earlier I mentioned that if you have this frame to one side, make it the right side. It's not that something's wrong with it. This actually has to do with a great feature.

When you display a vertical picture, the shape of the frame forces it to squeeze the picture into the middle, as shown in the first photo, below. Remember what I said at the beginning about the importance of not having to peer in close? This frame has a solution. If you tilt it onto its left side, as shown in the second photo below, it detects that you've done this and reorients the photo to use the whole frame. I love it!

I love this feature so much, I would probably be standing in front of the photo frame now, turning onto its side and back depending on the photo, except that I came up with a better solution. Now ourdoings.com has two additional RSS feeds, one for horizontal and one for vertical pictures. We put the frame in one orientation and set it to the RSS feed for that orientation. Then we enjoy full-frame photos for a long time. Occasionally we switch to the other orientation, pulling in a different set of photos that give us another angle on the same story. It's very enjoyable.

And we don't have to do any work!  We just upload all our photos to ourdoings.com.  They're organized automatically by date for web presentation, and by orientation for photo frame presentation.  The photo frame finds and displays the new ones without us even touching it.

The only problem is that when you put this particular frame to your left and tilt it onto its left side, you're looking at it from what would normally be below. It's impossible to make an LCD look good from all angles, and this is the bad one. Turning the frame onto its right side won't work; it doesn't detect that.

That's why you want the frame on the right side of whatever surface you put it on. As long as you do that, you'll like your wireless digital photo frame as much as we do.

Product links in association with Amazon

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Safer Than The Playground

(Bruce Lewis) When kids play on the playground, they might be seen by someone with bad intentions. That person might notice the family car, and see town or school stickers hinting where those kids live. The risk is there, but we parents aren't about to stop taking our kids to the playground. It's too much fun!

Anybody can look at a playground. Not everybody can look at what you put on ourdoings.com. By default you get an "unlisted" link. The chances of a stranger typing in a random sequence of characters and getting to that link are about one in a trillion. Even if they did win that lottery, they wouldn't get contact information unless you deliberately put it there.

Why Do We Even Worry?

Many people are unconcerned about showing images of their kids, even in public settings. You see pictures in local newspapers, with full names and hometowns. Theatre performances include full names and bios for child cast members. Why don't people worry about those situations, but do worry about anything related to the Internet?

You might say fear of the unknown, but in 2008 people know the Internet. More likely it's fear of the unseen, just like in the movies. The scariest movies are where the monster is never in full view. Godzilla is extremely dangerous. He's as tall as a building, and can instantly burn you and the area around you to a crisp. Yet we don't find Godzilla scary. A small, unknown creature that scurries around in the shadows is scary, even though it can't possibly be as dangerous.

A number of television documentaries have covered Internet predators. From what I've seen, they don't scurry around in the shadows of the Internet. They go to places designed for people to meet people: chat rooms. But because they aren't physically seen, they still trigger that danger instinct.

Another thing that affects our perception of danger is hormonal changes that happen after becoming a parent. I'm talking about fathers here. One time not long after we had kids, my own father noticed a sprout of poison ivy in our back yard. I felt an overwhelming rush of protective instinct and immediately yanked the sprout out with my bare hand. How rational was that? (I washed with soap right away and was OK. Thanks for asking.)

What Do We Do About It?

I don't think we can casually brush worry aside, rational or not. It needs to be addressed. At the same time, let's face it: life is too short to let memories get buried in our hard drives or old emails. Having photos on ourdoings.com has enriched my life in many ways. When I look at recent photos and they remind me of past events, I can view those past events in two clicks. My parents get a rich diet of grandkid pictures. Old friends get an occasional update on my family life in a format that's easy to skim through.

So how do I enjoy all these benefits while addressing worry? The first step is to set a stake in the ground as to how much risk is acceptable. After all, the only way to be 100% safe is to lock your kids in a room where nobody ever sees them. Never take pictures of them. The person behind the counter where you print your pictures could keep an extra copy. If you send pictures to relatives, they could show them to somebody else! As Ben Franklin said, three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.

This is where I draw the line: I expect my online activity to introduce less danger than allowing my kids to play in a room where the shades are up. In real life, my safety standards are looser. I do let them play outside. But like I said, worry needs to be addressed, rational or not. So online rules are stricter.

That's why ourdoings.com has multiple mechanisms in place to keep strangers from finding your photos. First, there's your link. Typically it looks something like http://ourdoings.com/unlisted/wxcs5g7u/. I already mentioned the random part that makes it difficult for strangers to find. The word "unlisted" in the link actually serves two purposes. People generally know to ask before sharing unlisted phone numbers, so this word reinforces the private nature of your photos for the people you do share them with. (You might want to spell it out in your own words to make sure, though.) Additionally, the word "unlisted" is part of a system that advises search engines like Google not to index your pages. If you think all this is overkill, you're welcome to change your link to something easier to remember.

In fact, you're welcome to change it at any time. If you think your unlisted link has leaked out to the public somehow, change it to something else. You also have a "tear down this site" option to remove everything. Further, if someone was rude or thoughtless enough to copy your link onto a public web page, Google and other search engines won't index it. They are told not to index it in two ways. If you do want to be included in search engines, you need to change two things on your site info page, in addition to either submitting your site to the search engine or making inbound links to it. It's almost impossible to make your content searchable by accident.

Other sites require your friends and family to register in order to see your private photos. In that situation, security depends on how good your friends and relatives are at choosing and safeguarding their passwords. Plus you're guaranteed some of them will be annoyed that they have to give out their email address and other personally identifying information. On ourdoings.com, they only give an email address if they want updates by email.

The really great thing about having unlisted pages instead of registration and passwords is that it's easy. Let your less technologically-inclined relatives get in without struggling. Let your friends see your photos without a lot of bother. Let yourself see your photos easily no matter what computer you're at. It's fun. And it's safer than the playground.

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No Doors to Close

(Bruce Lewis) Since OurDoings is US-based, users and prospective users might wonder if a US economic downturn might cause us to close our doors. In a word, no. We don't have any doors to close.

I started this site in 2004 while working full-time, and I'm still working full-time today. Even if I were the only user, which hasn't been the case since August 2004, it would still be worthwhile. There just isn't another site that presents my photos in such a nice format, organized for me. I'll always be a customer.

If the economy gets really bad, this site might get slower. Right now it runs on a more powerful server than it needs to, because I want to be ready for 15 minutes of fame, when many more people use it. However, if I needed to save money I could host the current usage level for $40 per month or less.

So it's not like this site could fail to meet revenue objectives and have its funding cut off. It doesn't need any funding. Definitely keep your own backups in case of major catastrophe. That's always a good idea. But once you've done that, don't worry.

What if the Economy Gets Better?

Another scenario you might worry about is, what if the economy gets better, lots of new companies start, and this site is killed by competition? That won't happen either.

I can keep this site running as long as I want. If some competitor arises that does everything better, I'll want to switch myself. I'll figure out the easiest way to do it, and help everybody else who uses this site to switch too.

But I don't expect to see any such competitor. You see, OurDoings works great for people who take a lot of pictures of their doings and don't have time to really organize them. This is not a lucrative market. People with zero time on their hands won't use it. Their photos will be buried for posterity on their hard drives, assuming the drive doesn't crash.

People with more time on their hands tend to become photo enthusiasts and join the large existing communities on conventional photo-sharing sites. I cater to people who have just a little time but not too much. The "sweet spot" for OurDoings is a small. Smart new companies aren't likely to bother competing here.

What About Partners?

The only truly essential partner is our hosting provider, LayeredTech. If they disappear, we temporarily disappear. It would take a day or two to get up and running somewhere else, based on the latest backup. But LayeredTech has been around for years, and their prices are competitive. A downturn might make more companies cost-conscious, turning them into LayeredTech customers.

The second most important partner is Cooliris, Inc. They provide super-cool PicLens slide shows. I would definitely miss them if they went away. A lot of people would. A replacement would surely show up eventually. In the mean time I would look at photos the way I did before PicLens came along and taught me that slide shows can actually be good. I'll write more about that another time.

Another partner I find myself using more and more is Snipshot. Thanks to their online photo editing, it's now easy to share doings online first, and crop/enhance photos later. This reverses the way things are done on conventional photo-sharing sites, and I like it. The Snipshot guys are living on the cheap, and an economic downturn would only make it easier for them to find low rent. Ditto for Disqus, which can be your public comment system if you choose to use OurDoings like a blog. In the unlikely even that either of these partners disappeared, I would just switch to one of their competitors. In the mean time, everything else would still work.

The Bottom Line

Nobody's going away. Stop making excuses. Click on that "Create Your Own" tab up there and share those photos.

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