Okay Geek Farm
t3ch Review - IPEVO Kaleido R7 Digital Photo Frame
Ricardo Trejo
I love photos and art, but for some reason I don’t own or use many photo frames. And with the introduction of digital photo frames that allow an endless amount of pictures to be displayed in a slideshow, I’ve deep down wanted to try one out. The IPEVO Kaleido photo frame not only does pictures via memory cards, but can also stream them wirelessly from your PC… or does it?
Product: IPEVO Kaleido R7 Photo Frame
What it says it does: Wireless, USB, and Memory Card capable digital photo frame
My experience: I’ve never been huge on owning photo frames, digital or not, but when I saw this particular one by IPEVO I must say I was intrigued. Mostly because it boasted some wireless features that allows the user to stream photos from their PC or even Flickr account. But before I get into that, I’m going to discuss the way it looks. And boy, is it a beauty. It doesn’t resemble much of a typical photo frame, since it’s standing atop a stand, but its black glossy front finish, 7” LCD (16:9 aspect ratio), and touch enabled face buttons make it look quite the modern device, though I could do without the stand. Along the back there is the A/C plug port, a Mini-USB and USB port, and on its side is a slot for SD, MMC, and MS memory cards. Oh, and did I mention it comes with a convenient remote control?
Now onto usability; The selling point that I would think for this product would have to be its wireless streaming capabilities, so I thought I’d try those out first. After hooking it up and setting up the wireless network on the frame, I then installed the software that came packaged in on my laptop. Now the way this is supposed to work is by having both your computer and the photo frame connected on the same internet connection, then pairing them together using the settings on both the EyeStage application and on the device itself. I did that and I got the “PC Link” message but after a few seconds I would connection to the PC - not to mention that the PC never recognized the photo frame at all. And having the EyeStage program being a clunky piece of frustration doesn’t help much either… Yeah, this isn’t a good start.
I looked up a couple of reviews on Amazon to see if I was the only one having an issue with the wireless, and not many people even mentioned it. Only one other person spoke about a sporadic connection.
So I decided to forget the wireless and just try out the remaining features. I took out a USB flash drive and placed on there about 50 or so images, then plugged it into the back of the frame. Everything worked great. I was watching a sweet slideshow, and I kept it on for days. Eventually, I turned it off but the next time I went to use it the device no longer detected all the images on the USB drive. I didn’t know what was happening; did the files get corrupted somehow? So I removed the drive and plugged it into a PC, but all my images were still there working perfectly. I plugged it again into the frame and again the some of the images would just show up as black emptiness. Very strange.
The final test I did on Kaledio photo frame was using the Mini-USB port located in the back and transferring some images from my laptop onto the frame’s 512MB internal memory. It worked like a charm. However, you can only delete images set onto the device by removing files from the folder when it is physically plugged into a PC. But other than that, photos can easily be moved around using this technique.
Overall, IPEVO’s Kaleido digital photo frame is something that looks good on paper, but when it’s time to walk the walk it doesn’t follow through. A lack of a shuffle features also takes away from the experience as it could take hours, depending on how many pictures you have, to get from one side of your photo collection to the other. If you’ve got yourself a USB flash drive or some memory cards full of images then it can do almost no wrong - the almost is that you could get something that does these exact same basic features for a lot cheaper.
I hope IPEVO’s foray into digital photo frames doesn’t end here though, as this concept holds a lot of promise - it just needs a little bit more work. Add in some MP3 playback, shuffle features, and a working wireless experience, oh, and uhhh ditch the stand, and you might have yourself the perfect digital photo frame. But as for this one, it’s a dud.
Pro’s: sports a modern design, basic features work well
Con’s: was unable to get wireless to work, too pricey, EyeStage software sucks, no shuffle feature
Price: $149
Where you can buy it: IPEVO
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