Kodak EasyShare W1020 10-Inch Wireless Digital Frame

Kodak EasyShare W1020 10-Inch Wireless Digital Frame
From Kodak

Price: $214.99
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Ships from and sold by Technology Galaxy

10 new or used available from $197.00
Average customer review:

Product Description

10" (25.4 cm) high-quality display / 16:9 Aspect ratio / LED backlight / 300:1 Contrast Ratio / Wi-Fi enabled / Quick Touch Border / 512MB internal memory 8.7 x 5.2 (22.1x13.2cm) display area 800x480 display resolution, aSi TFT active matrix 350 NITs brightness JPEG, EXIF Image file formats MPEG 1 and 4, AVI, MOV Video formats MP3 Audio formats Memory cards supported - Secure Digital (SD), Secure Digital High Capacity (SDHC), Multimedia Card (MMC), MEMORY STICK (MS), XD-Picture Card (xD), COMPACTFLASH (CF), and USB flash drives Dimensions - 11.7 x 8.2 x 1.3 (29.8x20.8x3.4cm) Weight - 31.5 ounces (893 grams)

Product Details

* Size: 10-Inch
* Brand: Kodak
* Model: W1020
* Original language: English
* Dimensions: 3.50" h x 9.75" w x 13.50" l, 5.91 pounds
* Display size: 10

Features

* 10-inch high quality LCD with 16:9 aspect ratio; KODAK Color Science gives your pictures crisp details and vibrant colors
* Wireless access to pictures on your home computer and leading photo sharing sites featuring Kodak Gallery and Flickr with built-in Wi-Fi capability
* Play your videos or listen to your favorite MP3’s with the frame’s built-in speakers.
* Store up to 4000 of your favorite pictures directly on your frame’s 512 MB of internal memory
* 2 SD card slots are available to allow you to have extra memory to view more pictures

Editorial Reviews

From the Manufacturer
The new Kodak EasyShare W1020 10-Inch Wireless Digital Frame comes with built-in wi-fi, making it super-easy to share and receive photos wirelessly from friends and family. You can even personalize your frame with RSS feeds. The W1020 also features interchangeable faceplates and includes fun features like the ability to play MP3s and create on-frame multimedia shows modes.

Customer Reviews

MAC user - DO NOT BUY THIS FRAME
I bought this digital frame because it has been advertised as being compatible with macs on a number of web sites. It is not - software is not included in the packaging for macs and their website does not offer the "digital display software" needed for all the functions to work on a mac platform - you are paying for wireless capabilities that will not work!!!

I am extremely disappointed. I tried calling the 800 number- I was on the hone for 49 plus minutes and got NO where. I suggest buying a much much cheaper digital frame from any other company - you are not getting what you pay for in this product.

7 inch frame: Great frame, could use better resolution.
This is the review for the 7-in frame, since Amazon has yet to figure out that they need distinct reviews for each distinct model (hello, Amazon?).

Fantastic aesthetics on the frame, my wife and I were impressed, and my mother-in-law was even more impressed when she unwrapped it for Christmas. The frame is beautiful, and the red matte contrasts perfectly between the dark frame and white touch border.

The software on this frame is awesome, once you get used to the touch border and how to use the controls. This software seriously saved my keester. Story:

I neglected to order a SD card reader for the extra SD card I had laying around and planned to use for this frame, since I figured my wife's camera would have no trouble allowing us to transfer pictures from her computer onto the blank SD card if it is was in her camera.

I was wrong, and the camera only let you transfer photos from Camera-to-PC, and not PC-to-Camera. Of course, being the master of procrastination that I am, I had waited until Christmas Eve to figure this out. My wife was unhappy with me, and all the nerd knobs in my brain started turning to devise a solution.

Alas, I found a USB memory stick with enough space to store the photos, but it was so long that it stuck out beyond the frame. Great. Remember how I said the software saved my keester? Guess what folks, once I had the USB stick and the SD card plugged into the frame, the software built into the frame allowed me to copy the photos from the USB stick over to the SD card. Kodak, me and my keester thank you.

All-in-all a really well built frame. In a non-widescreen format, and a bit sharper resolution, this frame would be a perfect 5 stars. As it stands, the frame will either "windowpane" photos, or automatically zoom in on them to fill the screen but then you can't control the cropping that occurs.

Of course, you can manually crop in an image editing program, but if you're buying for someone who is not computer savvy, you probably want to remain as hands-off as possible, and preferably just have them dump their digital photos to the SD card and go.

The resolution doesn't lend itself well to close-up inspection, or to capturing vivid detail in images (did that hummingbird have 3 eyes?), but it's inexpensive if you catch the right deal, and it looks great from across the room.

Mother-in-laws everywhere need one of these, or a bigger brother of it.

Nice (once you get it to work)
I received this unit for Christmas and seriously thought about sending it back. However, after several days of playing with it to figure out several issues that aren't adressed in the product manual or SW updatees I finally have it working well enough to give it a fair review based upon the 10/28/2008 firmware and 1.1.3.58 Easyshare PC software.

My anticipated use for this frame is to place it in a public area then connect to a PC wirelessly to change slideshows and background music on the fly during parties. The weak points for this use case appear to be:

1) Setup of Wireless connectivity. My experience was better than most with the frame connecting to an unsecured network and then to a secured net after enabling WAP. However, manually adjusting the network parameters resulted in an inability to re-establish communications with the frame stating my security was wrong even though I verified it meticulously. The corrective action for this was to restore the frame to factory defaults (volume up and power) then re-enter the exact same data.

2) Slide transitions are much slower than the rate set in slide show options. This appears to be caused by the frame rescaling my images on the fly to fit them to the LCD. A faster processor would have been nice, but performance is usable setting the transition to the fastest rate. If you pre-load a slideshow to the frame and allow for resizing during the transfer it works better but this was not aligned with my use case.

3) Wireless speeds seem to be a little slow in transfering large amounts of data between the PC and the frame. Since this is not a multi-tasking user-interface device the frame (and PC Software) appears to be frozen during 10 minute updates.

4) Background audio breaks up when playing slideshows. This occurred with the audio and video files transferred wirelessly or pre-loaded on the frame. My initial assumption was the processor in the frame is just plain undersized or incompatible with my MP3 ripper.

Attempts to correct this by re-ripping my audio tracks at a lower bit-rate were fruitless although I did notice that audio worked well while not in a slide show. What helped out enormously was changing the transition effects.

I'm starting to believe there is a memory corruption issue in the 10/28 FW when using WIPE and a couple other effects. Fade/Zoom seems to work fine. While I occasionally hear a slight rhaspyness in a track, this may just be a limitation of the audio fidelity of the frame.

5) The PC Software for creating slide shows BLOWS CHUNKS. When accessing a directory on the frame it is unresponsive up while it downloads all of the information. This is excessive when you've downloaded 1000 images and just want to update a couple. It's also pretty sad to see the special edition of Easyshare SW for the frame doesn't even have a sort button for merging photos from several cameras by date.

For that matter, the frame only plays in order of file name or picture date, making a scripted slide show more difficult to create. The slide show preview doesn't allow for deleting photo's from the show and the images in the picture tray are way too small to make judgement calls on.


So it may sound like I'm down this frame, not really. As a bleading edge product it can be made to perform well and offer features this year that others will be adding next.

The question you must ask yourself when considering this frame is are you willing to invest the time learning how to make it work and hope for firmware and PC software updates over the next few months to improve usability or would you rather wait another year for a more mature product from Kodak and others.

If you aren't willing to spend a few hours frustrated wondering if problems are your media, network or the W1020, then save some money and drop the WIFI feature. If you really want to be the first in your group with a WIFI frame, then be aware that you can make this frame work pretty well if you invest the effort.

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