Smartparts SPX8 8-Inch Syncpix Digital Picture Frame

I bought this to hold family photos for my elderly father to watch. The picture quality is excellent. Automatic upload from memory cards is nice. But the user interface and usability leave a lot to be desired. For example, instead of the forward arrow taking you to the next picture and the back arrow to the previous, they bring up a small thumbnail display and you have to select the picture you want next. Not what you would expect, not intuitive at all. I had hoped the interface would be simple enough for my father to use. It wasn't, so he is left just being able to watch the slide show and not able to show his friends a particular picture.

First one arrived soon enough but was dead on arrival. Would not even start up. Second one is working fine. Good price. Resolution ok.

I bought one of these about a year ago. Was VERY happy with it...great picture quality, features, resolution, etc.. Note they only come with a 90-day warranty. Guess they don't feel very confident about their own product. Well, the remote stopped working and it's less than a year old. I figured it might need a new lithium battery in the remote, so I carefully tried removing the old one. That's when the cheap plastic battery holder broke. Getting around that problem, it still would not work. I emailed the company. After several tries they emailed me they were sending out a free new replacement remote. That made me happy. After two weeks it never arrived. So I contacted them again. Remember this took several emails on my part, and finally a phone call to someone in tech support (Angel) who assured me a new one had been mailed. That first one had never, of course, been sent. They finally did send out a new replacement remote, it looks different, I'm not sure if it's even the right one. Either way, the frame doesn't recognize it, so I am back to using it manually. My conclusion is the frame was good, for less than a year, but their customer service sucks. Cannot even find replacement remotes on their website IF you choose to order one. I wonder how long they will stay in business.

`Loved the SP15MW I bought in 2007 from Costco: Big, bright screen and wonderful Slideshow Shuffle feature (displays your photos in random order so it's always a surprise as to what photo will come up next). The SP15MW sold here does NOT have the Slideshow Shuffle. Your photos will display in the same, predictable, sequential order each time you turn the frame on. SmartParts disingenuously retained the same model number even as it downgraded the feature set.

Like many other reviewers have indicated, although this frame looks good on paper with regard to features, it's a crapshoot as to whether you'll get one that actually works. I am about to return my second (and last) one in two weeks.

The first one was completely dead out of the box. Got nothing but a fuzzy horizontal line when I turned it on. It's replacement works except for the motion detection, which doesn't really work at all. 95% of the time it doesn't turn off after the 15 minutes I've set it for, and then on the rare occasion that it does finally turn off, no amount of motion seems to turn it back on and you're forced to power cycle it using the remote.

This would be a good frame if it actually worked, but from the reviews here, and my own experience, there are too many of them that don't.