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.

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Vertical Photo Squeezed to Fit

After Sensing Orientation Change

Photo Looks Dark from the Right