DigitalSmartFrames.com

The digital photo frame market has a plethora of manufactures, some relatively new to photography related products, but for some like Kodak, it’s a natural extension of their brands. Kodak digital picture frames have become well established in the market, and the Kodak EASYSHARE W820 (along with its larger 10 inch version the Kodak W1020) is one of their best.

The Kodak W820 has all the features in that make the EASYSHARE line of digital photo frames great, including the Quick Touch Border Controls and Alternate Color Mattes, and adds a Wi-Fi feature which significantly enhances one of the key elements of digital frames: getting pictures from you computer to the frame.

The Basics

Kodak LCD digital frames including the W820 come with high quality screens. The W820 sports an 8 inch screen that comes in 16:9 “movie” screen format in 800 x 480 resolution, so pictures appear pretty crisp and clear. The frame itself is black and as mentioned above, many of the Kodak EASYSHARE frames attempt to give you the opportunity to do more in terms of customizing the look of your frame through interchangeable faceplates. The W820 comes with 2 additional mattes so you can choose the one that best fits the décor of your room. Note that the interchangeable matte is the outer one (the one bordering the frame), there is still a second matte in cream color bordering the screen. So your digital frame ends up with what we think is a great double matted look. You can also buy additional color mattes from Kodak if you really need a different color.

The W820 also has a good desktop stand that swivels for display in both portrait and landscape direction, plus nail slots if you want to hang it on a wall. Note one thing lacking with this frame (and the other EASYSHAREs) is a remote control, which is something common in many digital frames today.

Transferring and Storing Pictures with the Kodak W820

Data ports on the W820 are generous, including 2 memory card readers which support all the basic formats, including SD, SDHC, MMC, compact flash, plus there are 2 USB ports – a standard size for a thumb drive and a mini-USB for a computer USB cord. Once connecting your memory device to the frame, your pictures will begin displaying right away, or they can be transferred to the internal memory, which consists of 512 MB capable of holding as many as 4000 pictures depending on resolution.

Quick Touch Border Controls

As mentioned, your pictures generally start playing right away when a memory device is connected to the frame, but you’ll want to control display features and other settings in the W820. All of these are controlled using a menu driven border control system, which is a standard EASYSHARE feature and very unique. Basically the function ‘keys’ appear on the screen and are activated by pressing the adjacent border (keeps your smudgy fingers off the frame), so transfers, slideshows, and all settings are driven by the system.

Slideshow options are good, letting you set basics around how long to play each picture and transitions, though you can do more with slideshows by using the included software from Kodak, basically a “Digital Frame Edition” of the Kodak EASYSHARE photo application. Load this software on your computer, and use it to manage your photos and do creative things like build slideshows.

Wi-Fi Capability

What the W820 (and W1020) really give you over your average Kodak EASYSHARE frame are the wireless capabilities. Wi-Fi is used in a couple ways, first by allowing you to stream information such as news and weather updates via RSS feeds through a service called FRAMECHANNEL. This really turns your digital frame more into a information portal and in the view of DSF.com, is the direction these LCD digital frame devices will ultimate head.

The FRAMECHANNEL feeds are also enabled using the Kodak EASYSHARE Software, and several come pre-configured. If you want, you can configure it to feed information from other sources as well as long as they have an RSS feed (which is virtually anything on the web these days).

The second and probably more relevant use of Wi-Fi for most buying a Kodak wireless digital frame is the use of the W820 with Flickr. For those of you who don’t know, Flickr is a very popular online photo management and sharing site (associated with Yahoo). Through the use of the photostream feature at Flickr, you can wirelessly transfer pictures from your Flickr albums directly to your frame, totally eliminating the need to transfer pictures via ports or memory devices. This is an incredibly useful feature for those who what to dynamically and frequently change pictures displayed on their frame.

Multi-Media

Digital frames and more than digital photo albums these days, and the Kodak W820 is no different. You can download, store, and display video in MPEG, AV, and MOV formats. The Kodak W820 also has built-in speakers that are better than expected, and thus audio can be stored and played as well (MP3 format). This is especially nice if you want to use your computer software to build a slideshow with music in the background, adds a nice touch to slideshows played on your digital photo picture frame.

Here are our final ratings for the Kodak EASYSHARE W820. We give it 4 stars.

	Kodak EasyShare W820 8-Inch Wireless Digital Frame List Price: $199.00 Sale Price: Too low to display Used From: $73.99 Average Rating:
	DIGITAL FRAME, 8" W820, WI-FI,