5 Responses for "HP sd828a1 8-Inch Smart WiFi digital Photo Frame"

1. Philip Graham March 5th, 2010 at 3:11 pm 1

   I could not make it work with my WPA2 wireless network.

   I gave up after several hours of trying. Don’t waste your time on this product.
   Rating: 1 / 5

2. Jess Wright March 5th, 2010 at 4:36 pm 2

   I bought this hoping the HP brand would mean the bugs were worked out before the product was released, no such luck. I found it was quite easy to set up and that is why it is not a 1 star. It also plays videos from my NAS media server but doesn’t resize it for the right resolution, widescreen movies are stretched to fill the screen and makes everything look tall. The biggest problem is the frame locks up constantly, to a point that it is unusable. I still haven’t been able to display pictures from a SD card. Internal memory requires building of a database before use which can take an incredibly long time but after that it will display pictures but the internal memory is only 500MB or so. It can stream pictures from the media server but will display for a while and lock up. The feature to display facebook pics is a great idea but you can’t set it to display all picture folders from multiple people, you manually have to set which folder to display, this make is worthless to me as the whole purpose is to set it and forget it and have it display pictures. The menu scrolling is kind of slow but not a big deal as long it does what it is supposed to do.
   Rating: 2 / 5

3. AKW March 5th, 2010 at 6:56 pm 3

   First and foremost, I haven’t really used much of the Wi-Fi functions on this frame with the exception of synching up with Photobucket and that seemed to work decent enough. The main reason for buying this was it seemed much easier to upload pic files from a PC via USB whereas most of the other digital frames are geared more for using memory cards/sticks and for just transferring pics from a digital camera. Connecting with the USB cable seemed simple enough when it was initially hooked up and a few files were transferred, but the next day the PC wouldn’t recognize the frame when it was hooked up. So I had to spend hours tweeking the thing to get my PC to recognizing it again. Once that was done and I was able to load up some jpeg and mp3 files is where the real problem began. With less than 800 jpeg files and a handful of mp3 files the drive was full which seemed kind of odd for a frame that supposedly has 512MB for memory, but whatever. . fair enough. The problem is once all the photos were on there accessing them was significantly problematic. Clicking on the “All Photos” button from the Internal Memory section continually got me an error message telling me the database was busy and I had to access the photos via the folders section. Well the folders section only lists a small percentage of the photos on the drive and even then it is difficult to access them as clicking on any individual photo repeatedly sometimes still wouldn’t bring it up on the display. When pics did come up the display quality was pretty nice. The sound quality is less than impressive when playing MP3s so I can only assume it would be the same if you’re accessing internet radio stations as well. Again I realize I was only purchasing this for limited functions that others may not care about, but if a product has this many flaws on just things I care about I’m guessing they’ll carry over to other aspects of the device as well.
   Rating: 1 / 5

4. David K. Mitchell March 5th, 2010 at 7:26 pm 4

   I bought this frame as a gift for my mother so she could display photos of my daughter. I realized that any frame where she had to manually update the photos on the frame would likely become an unused brick unless if I continually mailed her updated flash drives. I selected this frame because of its integration with flickr and the capability for me to use a website to do the necessary updates to display new photos from flickr.

   This frame was very easy to setup. I turned it on and it detected my wireless network. I entered the password (I have WPA2 security BTW) and I was on the frame. The next step was to use a computer to go to [. . . ] and sign up for an account. I set up an account for my mother and was able to quickly get multiple flickr accounts activated for the frame. I selected which albums (sets) to make available to the frame. One gripe is that the albums appear on the frame in an apparently random order. Once the albums are activated for use on the frame, you can view them seconds later on the frame. As another reviewer mentioned, you cannot display more than one album at a time. Also, I will need to log on to my mother’s hpframe account (on the web) to activate any new albums I add to flickr (they are not automatically updated). However, if I were to add photos to an existing set on flickr they would automatically be included when my mother viewed the album on the frame.

   I also set up internet radio. The search interface is clunky, but I selected a station (KEXP) to play and almost instantly it was playing. The internet radio continues to play in the background as I navigate around the frame. The sound is ok, but I’m not an audiophile and I don’t expect a picture frame to replace a stereo.

   I also set up the weather gadget that shows the present conditions and 3 day forecast for up to 3 locations. Youtube setup was easy and playback was smooth. You can connect to your account so you can watch videos that you have uploaded. You also can browse through different categories (Comedy, Music, News, etc) and view the top-rated or most videos for those categories.

   Finally, I enabled the ability to email photos to the frame. You enter an email address, which receives instructions on how to send an email to the frame (basically you just attach a photo to the frame’s assigned email address and then you can navigate to the folder on the frame to display it). An icon in the corner of the frame indicates that you have a new photo. This email worked for the first photo I sent, but not the second, so there may be some bugs. It’s also not clear how to delete these emailed photos from the frame, and emailing photos will still require my mother to find the emailed photos section of the frame.

   I also briefly connected to my home computer through Windows Media Player 11 to view videos and photos and it seemed to work.

   I have not connected the frame to a computer to do a mass download of photos, but it appears this is done by connecting a USB cable between the frame and computer and then dropping and dragging folders to the frame.

   Putting in a memory card to the back of the frame automatically starts a slide show. By selecting the settings button on the remote you can access a menu that lets you choose different slide show options (how long a photo displays, single photo or four photos, etc) and also copy a picture down to the internal memory of the frame (this works for flickr albums too!). When playing a slideshow you can pause by hitting the pause button on the remote. Unfortunately a little pause icon appears and stays on the screen.

   The frame is primarily controlled by a remote with 18 buttons on it, all with a picture icon. It takes some getting used to, and sometimes there seems to be some lag between touching a button and the frame reacting. There are some buttons on the back of the frame to control it that way, but that would get pretty awkward and old quickly.

   Finally, I’m not a fan of the physical frame. It’s plastic, and obviously plastic, and has a weird wave shape to it. Classy it is not. The actual display seems nice. One last quibble is that the power cord seems short.

   Overall, I think this frame will work well for my mother and allow her to relatively easily view new photos that I post on flickr. There are some annoying quirks (only being able to view one album/folder/set at a time, the pause button displaying if I want to just see one photo and not a slideshow, the occasional slowness of the remote) and the actual frame is a bit cheesy and plasticky.

   Rating: 4 / 5

5. Thomas F. Strange March 5th, 2010 at 8:00 pm 5

   Opened the box, plugged in the power, and followed the simple one page quick start menu to get this device going. In less than 5 minutes I had Facebook pages up and viewing, with only one headscratch that was really not an issue, as I had paged into an unfamiliar screen and it took me back on the next click. The wireless features worked without a hitch. Response to commands is perhaps slower than I like but not a thing you really notice. I then sent a picture from my phone to the frame and while that works, it does load slowly (about 5 minutes to send one picture) which seems more to do with the Blackberry and Verizon, since as soon as it indicated the picture was sent it immediately appeared on the frame as an item to select. I have not yet sent video by wireless, but I bought this for still frames, so that will wait for later. Video clips on a USB device played without a hitch. When this comes out in a larger format I would like to use it at work. Many applications for pushing out communication cheaply. Great device, and the imbeded Zipit feature set is worth the price.

   Rating: 5 / 5