THIS is the answer to "What am I going to do with all those photos and movies?" "Is my photo collection just a hoarding vanity project never to be seen?" THIS IS YOUR SOLUTION!
PROs: Top quality 1080p (really "2K" or 1200p vertical pixel density – which is even better! IPS type display panel)
TOUCHscreen (you can finger swipe back and forth at any time).
Good color depth, color and grayscale fidelity
Good viewing angles, anti-glare coating.
Plays back still photos and/or MPEG (.MP4) movies (with audio on or muted if you want).
No hiccups or flakiness.
Shuffle or timeline play.
Shows tile title date – IF you want it.
Shows current time of day in upper right corner (12 or 24 hr) IF you want it.
Shows current temperature and sunny/cloudy/rain symbols – IF you want that.
You don't have to buy the upgraded Frameo app if you don't want to. It works just fine (and I'm pretty happy) with the standard app.
It's not too big and not too small. Two or three people could stand next to each other and enjoy the picture from a few feet away, yet the frame doesn't "take over". You can find a spot for it.
The frame "matte" built into the black frame outline does a decent job of mimicking a real photo frame matte.
You can use BOTH the internal storage and any docked external storage (USB or SD card) at the same time.
Picture quality is GREAT out of the box. No need to fuss but you can control cropping and brightness if you want to.
CONS: Must be powered by AC wall adapter. The darn thing works so well, I want to use it like a tablet, makes me wish it had an internal battery that would function for an hour or two when frame unplugged. Oh well, it's still a heck of a unit.
I loaded my files with a tiny Samsung USB drive. You have to use either FAT32 or XFAT file system (NTFS file system pen drives will not be recognized).
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BOTTOM LINE: HIGHLY RECOMMENDED! We are very pleased.
UPDATE 10/05/2024 IF YOU ARE HAVING PROBLEMS GETTING YOUR MOVIES TRANSFERRED and "RECOGNIZED" by the PEXAR.
Technical tip to owners of Sony and Panasonic digital cameras as far as movies are concerned, something that might help your movie files get "recognized" by this Pexar device:
If you have any 1080p (i.e. High Definition pixel density) MOVIE files created by your camera that have an .MTS file format (file extension), YOU'LL WANT TO RENAME THAT FILE EXTENSION TO BE: .MP4 (stands for Motion Picture Expert Group 4) file extension. You'll want to do this before transfering the files if you are using external storage (like USB-pen flash drive, SD ("Secure Digtal") card, etc.
Once you do what is mentioned above, the PEXAR can then recognize these renamed movie files and play them just fine
For the geeks or curious, MTS (aka MPEG Transport Stream) is a container wrapper of sorts for an MP4 file. Internet search will tell you how / why these variances of video formats came about. It doesn't matter, once you rename the file extension to MP4, the movie will play just fine in the PEXAR frame. You want to "swim with the biggest school of fish" in the technical world of video (if you want the least hassle) and the .MP4 format is exactly that in the world of High Definition (HD) video.
P.P.S. I also owned some ANCIENT home movies from a 12 year old Fuji digital camera taken in .AVI format (Audio Video Interleave). I had to do a file conversion of them to .MP4 format so the PEXAR could successfully play them. . I used a simple movie editing software (Windows Movie Maker – no longer made, but there are other conversion software utilities running around that can do the job). Once I did that, the movies shot in this old format play just fine in the Pexar frame.
ABOUT VIDEO LENGTH: Some users have stated a 15 second video length limit. That has not been my personal experience. I successfully have this frame playing videos of 2 minutes long of my kitty cat wallering in the driveway. This is 24 fps (frames per second) .MP4 files. HOWEVER, you ** will ** get a warning that importing that large video will eat into your 32GB of internal memory. Such is life. NOTE: I am ** not ** relying on the paid subscription Frameo app. I just use a USB pen drive. Even with importing probably quantity: 6 X 2 or 3 minute length HD .MP4 videos, I still have somewhere around 8 or 10 GB of internal memory left at this point.
P.P.S. WHAT FOLLOWS IS BORING, IT MAY HELP A FEW OF YOU WHO ARE NEW: Those of you with mega fancy cameras (full frame or APS-C Canon, Nikon, Sony, etc cams) that produce 20MB+ files: There is no need to fill up the internal memory in this frame with 20MB per photo file sizes, that is overkill and ridiculous. (My opinion). JPEG (or .JPG) is what you want as a file format type/medium for still photos with this frame. An 850KB to 1MB per picture JPEG file at 200 Pixels per inch ("pixel density") will do fine for 1080p viewing resolution and, if you want it a bit nicer (i.e. 1200dpi vertical , roughly "2K" viewing resolution) then bump up your saved file size to say 1.2MB per photo size. There are a lot of photo editing programs out there that will do "interpolation" to reduce / downsize your monster sized pure-overkill source file size to work with this 11" frame size display. (i.e. Photo software that will keep aspect ratio/proportion while reducing pixel density). You will gain some file "compression" when you downsize the file. So what? Few people can tell a difference on a frame of this size. Your goal should be to get things done while delivering a decent quality experience…right? You could, in a pinch, use one of those screen snipping software tools that comes native with your operating system and just select, snip, and capture a full screen display of the original photo/file AND THEN save that screen capture output (which will likely be 72 dots per inch (dpi) from the "clipboard" into a paint program as a JPEG. Very crude but it would get you by till you purchase a true photo editing program. Most beginners will be fine (or probably better served maybe) by a "lite" version photo editor. Again it's just my opinion. YMMV.
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