ViewSonic VFD1028W-11 10.1-Inch Digital Photo Frame Features High Resolution 1024x600 (Black)

This frame worked perfectly - for the time that I used it before putting it in a box and wrapping it for Christmas! I got it for my mother and the clarity on the pictures are amazing. Always have been a fan of ViewSonic. It has not been a disappoint. What I did notice right off was that I can move all my photos to a SD card and load it. Once in, the frame pulls from it. So while you can connect it to a computer and save them into the memory, why not just taken them from your computer to an SD card. It's less hassle and cleaner transfer! Love it and I know my mom will too.

Setup is easy and displayed pictures are excellent. Navigation through the various options is non-intuitive; it would help to have a few more buttons on the remote. The main difficulty I encountered was the sideways display of vertically formatted pictures (portrait mode). ViewSonic customer support was very slow in responding but after a week or so an email provided a hint as to the problem. Evidently, pictures not adhering to the resolution specifications of the display are displayed improperly if they are vertically formatted. There is no mention of this limitation in the user guide provided with the picture frame. An answer to a question posed concerning a competing product on Amazon suggested FastStone Photo Resizer as a free app for batch processing photos to reduce their resolution (size). I installed this app which worked very well. I chose to reduce all the pictures to the 1024 x 600 native resolution of the screen, making sure the "maintain aspect ratio" choice was selected. I have no idea what actually happens during this conversion since the aspect ratio of standard 35mm pictures is 4/3. The result is properly displayed vertical photos with black bars on each side. Choosing the display mode of "crop to fill" when setting up the frame seemed to provide the best results with my collection of pictures. This fills the screen horizontally for landscape mode photos without distorting the images (but of course removes some of the top and bottom of the picture).

I bought one of these 8x10 frames for my dad and he loved it, but when it came time to get one for my mom a year later they no longer seemed to carry the larger side. I ordered this and was a bit disappointed that it was not as large, but the picture is so clear and the frame works so well. My dad has had his for years and my mom one year less and they work better than the name brand wooden frame I got myself (mine is 11x14 but the picture is not nearly as vivid and it freezes with SD cards larger than 2 GB). The only downside for me is that it is black and modern-looking and would not go with the décor in my own home, or I'd have gotten myself one as well.

I looked over lots of the reviews and thought that the positives out weighted the negatives. For all of the positives, none of them stated that they had poor picture quality, but after receiving my picture frame and loading in my SD card with all of the photos I wanted to view, the pictures were either too bright or too dark. This was a gift for mothers day and was hoping to surprise my wife with a digital photo frame with all of the pictures of the past 8 years of our life and family.Contrast was too bright and when you try to adjust both Brightness and Contrast, the photos became either too Bright or too Dark.Good thing for me, Amazon has a great return policy, bad thing is I had to pay for the return shipping.I ended up purchasing the NIX Pro Series 12" digital frame. (So far no issues and software automatically rotates all photos)

I grabbed this ViewSonic VFD1028W-11 10.1-Inch Digital Photo Frame during an Amazon Lightning Deal just before Christmas. The price seems good since it was available for the same cost as the Pandigital Panimage PI8004W01B 8-Inch LED Digital Photo Frame (which I purchased more than one year ago). Upon examining the ViewSonic frame, however, I was disappointed.First of all, this ViewSonic is a bare-bone photo frame, with none of the fancy functions available on my old Pandigital photo frame. That means no WiFi transfer mode, no music/video playback capability, no navigation function, etc. Even the photo slide show function is very limited. At power up, this photo frame simply starts the slide show from the first image file it finds on the memory card, and moves on to the next one. The slide show is in the order the files were written to the card, and you cannot sort it by file name or file date. That makes viewing the slide show somewhat confusing, especially since you cannot display picture info such as 'picture taken date' on screen.Initially, image quality displayed on the ViewSonic frame is horribly. The pictures were too bright and very harsh. It turns out that the default setting for Brightness, Contrast and Saturation were all set to '9'. After I changed them to '6', the images became more acceptable. However, a more serious problem is with the LCD screen aspect ratio.Although this ViewSonic photo frame is advertised to have a diagonal screen size of 10.1 inches, the actual photo display area is much smaller. This is because the LCD has a resolution of 1024x600, which gives an aspect ratio of 1.7 to 1 (width to length). This ratio is commonly used by wide-screen TVs and tablets. But for a photo frame this is a BAD choice, because a typical digital point-and-shoot camera has an aspect ratio of 1.33 to 1 (or 4:3).Here's what happens when you display a 4:3 photo on this wide-screen LCD panel:- The default display mode ('Full Screen') will stretch the width of the image to fill the whole screen. In doing so, it creates horrible distortion that makes everybody look short and fat.- You can change the display mode to 'Crop to Fit'. This expands the image to fill the width of the screen, but cuts off about 20% of the image from top and bottom. Would you rather look short and fat, or have part of your head cut off? Tough Choice!- If you change the display mode to 'Fit to Screen', only the center 800x600 region of the display is utilized. The remaining 20% of the display area is simply blackened.Bottom line: I got this new '10.1-inch' photo frame, but the image it displays is not much bigger than that on my old 8-inch Pandigital frame (with 4:3 aspect ratio). I still consider it an acceptable value at the Lightning Deal price I paid. Definitely don't pay full price for it.