Kodak EasyShare SV811 8-inch Digital Picture Frame

This is a wonderful product and very easy for Mom to use after I set it up. I loaded digital and scanned photos on to a SD card, added in a few of Mom's favorites songs in a MP3 format and even choose a few .mov video clips. It was all pretty straight forward. I inserted the SD card into the photo frame and choose some display settings such as number of seconds to display each pictures and random transitions and whether the photo is displayed in original aspect or "stretched" to fit the entire displyable area. All Mom has to do is turn it on using either the supplied remote or the switch on the side. Mom can mute the sound or make higher or lower. Overall, she was very happy with this product! A more techy savvy Mom can do this all by herself.

We bought the SV-710 for Mom because it was the most popular digital frame on Amazon at the time. I can't imagine why it's so popular. The resolution is very poor, and Amazon doesn't even tell you what the resolution is in their product description.

It's a paltry 480x234, and it really shows (i.e., pics are grainy).

And the 16:9 aspect ratio doesn't help either. Your pics will be cropped to fit that aspect ratio.

If we were to purchase another digital frame, we'd go with a higher resolution and more standard 4:3 aspect ratio.

I researched a little before I purchased, since I've never used a digital frame and found this to be the best quality for the price. I bought one for a gift for grandparents, then liked it so well I got one for myself! It's easy to use once you set up the wireless (without wireless it's a little more complicated). The one thing I haven't figured out is how to save music to the internal memory! I would highly recommend this product.

Nice looking, easy to use. Takes about five minutes to figure out how it works. Good contrast and a wide angle of view.
If you don't want to spend too much on digital photo frame, I recommend picking these one. If you are looking for better technical specs go to the more expensive models.

I read a lot of mixed reviews about the Kodak SV710 7" digital frame and must agree with those who say it's a great product once you learn to work with how it works - much like many new electronic digital devices. The interface with the remote and frame is quite easy with a little time invested into it. PC connectivity is a cinch, no EasyShare software necessary, and is like turning the Kodak frame into a 'drag & drop' media bay.

It is incredibly important to be able to resize and crop larger raw digital camera or scanner images to the appropriate 800:480 [480:800 for portrait] dimensions. There is freeware on the web which is highly capable of this if you don't already have any. I've noticed a few people really not liking this and it's not all that bad. Widescreen is the fad these days anyway. Isn't panoramic a part of photography as well? My hundred-dollar Nikon digital camera has a setting for taking 16:9 pictures for lossless display on a widescreen. Kind of works perfectly for this frame.

The music is straightforward; place the MP3's on storage device, plug in to frame, and play from browsed selection. The Music Key on the remote is a nice shortcut to current audio files as well.

Video playback is rather picky and sensitive as to what it will recognize. First of all, it does not take only a Kodak camera's video capture for playback (rumored from other reviews), and secondly .Avi does not mean DivX. There's many boundaries and customizable settings into video codec (compressor/decompressor) processing that it almost seems ridiculous, but alas they're there and Kodak's digital picture frame isn't open to all of them. I have not found an .Avi or .Mov video which plays, but have found an .Mpg setup that does. If your video doesn't work, perhaps recoding it will do the trick.

The .mpg found to work for me is made of an MPEG1 container/codec with MP3 audio; the video works pretty well sized at 480:272, running 23.976fps, a bitrate anywhere above 700, and the audio doesn't need to be anything over 64kbps Mono. Again, there's freeware on the web which can do this.

Will still look into other compatible video formats and update any discoveries.

Most seem to dislike the lack of a random display function and no support of DivX, which can only be hoped for in some future firmware upgrade. If that's not going to happen, then perhaps it'll take learning how to recode videos (or find a nerdy friend who knows how) and maybe add a couple bundles of other photos of some neat CG 3D art, nature landscapes, or even of outer space to make it seem more random.

After my little time put into getting familiarized with the frame I am overall 90% satisfied for what it does and for the bargain it went for which is surely worth 5 stars.