Samsung Digital Photo Frames - SPF-71E, SPF-105P (Linus Tech Tips #6)
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2009-05-08
·
1,752 words · ~8 min read
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So today we've got a couple of new photo frames from Samsung. They're not just
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photo frames. They do have LCDs inside them. We have the SPF 105P and the SPF
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71E. And it occurred to me when we were
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talking about topics for a video that it's going to be pretty hard for people
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to come up with searching for these terms. And I thought, you know, I can't
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even figure out what these names mean. And then it occurred to me SPF is not
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sun protection factor. It's Is that even
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what SPF stands for? I don't actually know what SPF stands for. But either
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way, we're going to unbox these LCDs and show you some of the neat features.
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Okay, so we're going to start with the 7in model. Let's open this baby up. Oh
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yeah. Creating open box inventory.
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And I'm having a fair amount of difficulty with the sticker. There we
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go. Relive your best moments is what the marketing message right on the inside
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here reads. It's got a little blue bow.
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Isn't that sweet? So then we take this off. And you've got your instruction
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manual, which is in both English and French. Thank you, Kebec. And then we've
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got some warranty stuff. And right
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inside you will find the 7 in digital photo frame. Now, just move that aside
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for now. Next, inside you've got the
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Oh, wow. This is complicated. Okay, you've got a power cable. You've got a
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stand, which I will remove cuz right now all
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you can really see is me rumaging in the box. You've got a little stand that
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looks suspiciously like it. Um, never
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mind what that is. And then the other part of the power
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cable and a USB cable. So that is all
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the accessories that come with the SP710A.
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Is that what it's called? 71E.
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Okay. So the physical properties of the 7 in LCD photo frame. First of all,
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we've got besides the 120 megs of
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integrated memory in the unit itself, we've got a USB slot. So, we can use
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that for a USB thumb drive or we've got an SD slot so you can put an SD card in
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so you can store a lot more than 120 megs of photos and have them display on
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the screen. Now, you've also got your controls on the back, a Kensington lock,
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a power button, and here you will find a
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socket for this. So, I will demonstrate the
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proper use of this instrument and this socket. First, peel back the plasticky
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rubbery protective layer. Then, carefully insert the ball into the
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socket. Yeah, there we go. Okay. And then,
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see, that's not very well protected at all, is it? But what are you going to do? So, that is your stand and that is
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how the device will stay held up when you put it on the shelf.
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So, as the cameraman pointed out, the likelihood of the contents of this box
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being very similar to the other one is very high. So, we are going to do a
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speed unboxing here. Okay. Protective thing. Uh, driver CD that was not in the
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other one. The cameraman is clearly wrong. They do not contain the same thing. Manual warranty and
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a 10 in photo frame. Not that the number
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of inches is necessarily the most important thing.
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There we go. And this one also has kind of a cool, if I could get the cameraman
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to zoom in, it has kind of a neat uh swirly pattern to the frame, which I
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think looks pretty styling. If you can see that in our shot here. Not really
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sure. Either way, let's move on to what else is in the box. So, we've got uh a
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stand for the back. And this is an interesting shaped device. I wonder what
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this could be used for. Um, we'll get on to that later. And then we have power
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and USB. So, it is for the most part the same things inside. So, let's move on to
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showing you what they look like. First of all, we show you all of the inputs on
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the 10-in model. So, we've got compact flash right here. Then, we have Pick it
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up right there. Yeah. Okay. Then, we got USB for a USB thumb drive, USB for
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loading things onto the internal memory, and an SD card. Now, you will also see
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an input port at the back and that is
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for this thing. There we go. Oh, I broke it. Hold on.
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Okay, that's a little tricky. Bit of a tight squeeze there. There we go. So,
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that way we can have the 10-in one standing on its own.
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So, first thing, once you've wiped the fingerprints off that you've inevitably
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got on them while you were unpacking them,
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It's time to turn on your new digital photo frame. So, we will have that
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experience together right now.
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Aha. A lovely couple and a nice looking Asian
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family. And there's there's the family again. Some people in the bath.
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Excellent. As you can see, the 10-in one actually has a feature where it is
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playing music in the background. I'm not sure if the camera can hear that or not,
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but it's it's nice enough. But I think it would get pretty old. So, we'll
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investigate a little bit further into putting our own pictures on and maybe
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even our own music. So, I just wanted to briefly cover the viewing angle. The
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viewing angle on these is a lot better than what picture frame photo picture
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digital picture frames were about a year ago when I bought one. So, you can see
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the picture perfectly clearly at an angle of about like this. So, if you
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were to mount this on the wall or uh put it up on the mantle or whatever else,
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you'd be able to see it from a good part of the room, unlike older digital photo
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frames. But that pretty much concludes the 7-in model. It's got some controls
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on the back. Uh it's a pretty basic thing. So, we're going to move on to some of the neat features of the 10-in
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model. Okay. So, we plug in our USB thumb
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drive. And we'll use what is a very cool feature that this has, which is touch
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sensitive controls right here, which are actually
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proving to be kind of a pain. But the idea behind something like this is that
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you wouldn't necessarily be using it very often. So USB gets connected. So we
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click photo.
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Enter. There we go. So the uh the cameraman
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grabbed some pictures that he thought were pretty tremendous from my last
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vacation. And
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so we've got a new slideshow with the uh
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the pictures that he's chosen.
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Apparently most of these pictures involve me thinking that men are
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interesting and good. Ah, and women are scary. All right, so
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um moving on. I owe the cameraman one and we'll cover how to put music to go
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along with your photo. Okay, so we just connected the USB drive
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with the music on it and just kind of hold this up here. So, we navigate over
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to music, select it. I have to say though, the uh
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the um the menus on this digital photo
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frame are quite unintuitive at times. I'm not really sure which of these songs
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to actually select here. So, we'll go with um this one.
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Okay. So, at any rate, um, now we'll try
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to play a slideshow, which
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I can't figure out how to use this thing. I'm going to be 100% honest with
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you right now. I find the menu system very unintuitive and I find these touch
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controls are essentially useless because
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half the time they don't register any the stroke and the other half the time
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you like you're just basically putting a bunch of smudgy fingerprints. It's like
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licking one side of the frame and hoping that it's, you know, all going to look
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nice. It's all I'm not I don't like it
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very much. I suspect once we get it set up, it's terrific. So, we're just going
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to do that off camera and then we'll show you the product.
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So, we're going to wrap this up. This has been kind of a long and drawn out
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episode of uh my blog. Basically, um
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once we got it working, I have the clock enabled on here. It has an alarm clock
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feature along with you can set any number of different transitions. We've
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got it set to random right now. You can set which background music you want to
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use. I mean, here's a couple things that I was not impressed with as far as
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limitations go with the product. Uh, you can't use anything other than JPEG as
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far as we can tell for the photo format and also MP3 was the only sound format
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that we were able to get working. So, all in all, I'd say I'm pretty happy
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with the product. The image quality is stellar. It has a better viewing angle
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than the 7-in model. Obviously, on the 10-in screen, it has a very high
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resolution at 1024 by 600. Um, for the
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longest time, we couldn't figure out how to adjust the volume of the background music, but we did figure that out. It's
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something to do with, uh, using the up and down arrows, which, uh, honestly, if
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it was documented a little better, then it would be fine. It took me about, you
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know, 5 10 minutes to sit down with it, get it working exactly the way I wanted
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it. Once it's sitting on the mantle, then it operates as advertised. And
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honestly, it's a really cool little product. Thanks for watching Linus Tech
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Tips. If you have any comments or suggestions for future videos, please
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post them in the comments under the video.