Mustek PF-A700B 7-Inch Multimedia Digital Photo Viewer

I was given this frame as a gift and unfortunately it only lasted 4 months. The quality of the resolution was poor and now it will not work at all. I called the manufacturer but was told I must have received a "faulty" one and they only guaranteed it for 90 days.

I would not suggest purchasing this item.

My husband bought this digital photo frame for me in March 2007 and it was great. The image quality was good, it was simple to use, and I received nice comments on it in my office. Fast forward to June 2008 and the screen started to flicker every so slightly. Fast forward again to August 2008 and the screen started to pixelate and now it is dead. The frame won't even turn on. If you're buying this beware of the short life.

Can't complain about this product for it works as advertised. The only thing that bothered me was the load time was a little slow especially when you import larger picture files. But with the right software and time you can make it work flawlessly. Good luck and cheers!

It works as advertised. All you need to do is drop in a memory card and it just works! Could be a better picture, but for the price, a good value.

Well, it did everything I expected it to do for 11 months and now its dead. I wasn't expecting much due to its price last year and it worked like a charm up till a few weeks ago, when it would occasionally shut itself off. That became more and more frequent until today when it will power up, display the first picture, the display will degrade and go green and pixelated and then it shuts off. Over and over again. Time for the trash bin.

Regardless of the price (unless it was free), something like this has to last longer than 11 months. Judging from the reviews, I won't be buying a replacement frame from Mustek.

I Bought this product for my mother for christmas and I try seting up a family slide show with music in the back ground but it will play the music only or the pictures only not bother music and pictures together. I contact customer support and they said that this model does not suport playing both music and pictues at the same time. So I ask do you have a model that does and he says yes we have 2 different models and he named them. I just dont get why they would have it so only pictures will play or only music why even put the music as an option. well thats my veiw gl

The two aspect ratios programmed into this frame (16:9, 4:3) are not appropriate for the size of the frame. Neither of them allows the image to fill the frame without distortion. It would be nice if the manufacturer would add an additional choice of 'fill frame' to the list. Other than that it is a nice little frame. Just know that you will have black borders on two sides or distortion of your image.

I have buyers remorse-- I should have spent the extra money and bought a real digital photo display product. The aspect ratio is crazy, the pictures fuzzy and distorted. If having to resize and recrop your photos sounds like "easy to use" then you've got more time than I do! Net-net, don't buy it.

I bought this product for my mother and my mother-in-law. It has a picture that looks great from far, but is far from great. If you're 5 feet away or more, you will not notice the pixelation. As you get closer, however, you will start noticing every pixel on the picture. The transfer of images is simple and the speaker is a good addition. The speaker isn't the greatest, but how many picture frames do you know that have a speaker, it's not for music videos, it's for pictures.

Overall: Great gift idea, and if you want perfection, go ahead and spend that $150-$200 on another 7" frame. This one is just right for my wallet.

The main disadvantage of Mustek PF-A700B 7-Inch Multimedia Digital Photo Viewer is the format 16:9. It would be ok, but even if I cut my photos to this format, it doesn't show it fullscreen mode. It remains black stripes at the top and the bottom as if it shrinks my foto from 4:3. I believe this could be solved, but I haven't found the solution yet.
I'd recommend bying Coby DP772 7-Inch Widescreen Digital Photo Frame with MP3 Player. It's not as expensive as Philips (which are the best Digital Photo Frames) but it's more user-friendly.

The product performs exactly how I expected it to for the price. It's bright and unless you're extremely close the screen, the picture quality is just fine. Only complaint is that it has a hard time displaying very dark images, which isn't to much of an issue if you have any experience with photo editing software to brighten the image up.

This handy little tool is a nice way of showing off hundreds of your beloved pictures without having to fumble around with prints.

Resizing is a must with larger size images. I recommend either 640p or 800p to give you a really good picture. (Resizing is simple w/ the use of a Pic. program like: Picasa.)

You can also use it to view on a TV.

Drawbacks are: Not free to take anywhere/needs a power outlet; there's no cover for it, so, the screen can get scratched.

Overall though for the price you really can't go wrong with this one.

I bought this for my Mom for Mother's Day and by August it broke. 2/3 of the screen is filled with static. It broke just sitting on her counter top. I wasn't really thrilled to buy it in the first place, but it was cheap. I got what I paid for, and less.

The screen is not very bright although my Mom didn't notice (my brother did). The really weird thing with this, and many other digital frames, is that the screen is a 16:9 aspect ration, like a movie screen. Sounds great, right? Wrong. NONE of your photos are in this ratio (most are 4:3), so the frame either shows your photos with black bars down the side or by stretching the photo, which looks awful. My theory is that some Chinese factory make about a million too many portable DVD players and couldn't sell them, so made these instead (the screen is the right aspect ratio for movies).

Bottom line - do not buy this junky product. Spend more $$$ (which I'm now going to have to do anyway), and get one with the correct aspect ration.

By the way, my low-tech Mom LOVED the concept so I definitely recommend getting one for yours. Just not this brand.

For full info, read a longer, more thoughtful review, everything about this product has already been said twice. But I thought this was a great buy for the price. Other reviewers are correct, the actual resolution is 480x342, not whatever the specs in the Amazon description (or even the instructions that came with the product.) This means that it is an even better deal. This also means that the frame displays at a resolution which is just about the same aspect ratio as most digital cameras. Therefore, without much work, your pictures will fill up most of the screen (without black bars or being stretched or squished one way more than the other).

The only negative: It can not play mp3's at the same time as it displays pictures. While it is playing an MP3 it displays a graphic equalizer & a file listing. That is too bad, otherwise it would be perfect.

I puchased my first Mustek as a gift for my mom who lives far from all her children and grandchildren so I loaded up the memory card with photos that I gathered from all my brothers and sisters and our mom loved it. My sister then saw it on her living room table while visiting my mom and I thought why not get her one too for her birthday. She was elated. So now I have one too. It really is enjoyable to have a slide show of photos instead of one boring picture. The design is simple and goes with the decor of almost anyones home. The only drawback is that you need to resize the pictures so that they appear normal. Second to that, I think it would be nice if it came in a larger size as well. The one I have sits on the fireplace mantle and it's a bit hard to see the pictures from afar.
All in all, an excellent value for the money and an excellent choice as a gift or personal use.

el portaretrato tiene 2 modos 4:3 (el original de las fotos) y 16:9 (widescreen). las fotos se ven excelentes en modo 4:3 pero hay un pequeño detalle, y es que deja dos bandas negras a los lados...

quise poner las fotos full pantalla, pero me las deformaba. abri photoshop y recorte las fotos, pero no funciono. hasta que se me ocurrio deformar las fotos un 75% en escala horizontal sin afectar la vertical, y asi fue como finalmente funciono. tuve que hacer ese proceso en aproximadamente 400 fotos. nada facil

por lo demas, es bastante sencillo de utilizar, acepta los formatos mas comunes de tarjeta para camara y hasta pen drives. no tiene limitacion de tamaño para la tarjeta (yo le comptre un SD de 4gb y funciona perfecto).

de verdad quede un poco decepcionado por lo de la deformacion. no lo recomiendo para la gente que no sabe usar programas de edicion de imagen.

I got this frame as a Mother's Day present for my mom. I loaded up an SD card and installed it for her. It's very easy to set up and use. But I was very disappointed to discover that even though it is a wide-screen viewer (modes for aspect ratio of 4:3 and 16:9), the 16:9 mode is COMPLETELY USELESS!! It STRETCHES regular images to make them fit the screen. What kind of idiot thought of that??? I have a bunch of panoramic pics from our family reunion I wanted to be able to display in the full wide-screen mode, but since they're only displayable in 4:3 mode, they shrink down to fit within the smaller dimensions which makes it hard to see the detail.

If not for that one major problem, this would have been a great gift for Mom.

This was a gift from my husband, he knew I might like it and I do. the only problem I have is that is only runs AC. I have to keep it near a socket. Bummer...

I got this as a birthday gift for my friend. She really loves it. I'm getting another one for my mom. I think the quality is justified by the price. Tho, I was kinna hope that it can play music while displaying the pics but, clearly, it cant.

The manual is not very helpful in terms of how to get the pictures right in the 16:9 ratio without stretching them.

I'm pretty new with photoshop so it took me quite a while to figure this out. Some of the previous reviews were very helpful. Thanks, by the way.

Anyhow, here are the 2 simple steps that I used.

1. First, crop pictures into 12.5" X 7" (w x h)

2. Then, resize the picture 1000x757. True, it might slow down the loading time a bit more but the quality is much better compared to 480 x 363. You can play around within this proportion depends on your preferred quality and number of pictures.

I think some people are expecting a mini HDTV. The picture quality is great for viewing snapshots on your desk, and the programmable transitions add some visual interest as well. There's no programming or setup required, provided you use a CF or SD card - if you use a USB stick, the frame won't see it unless you direct it via the menus.

Expected much more from this product.

Images are slow to load - sometimes verrrry slow.
If you use a large card with many images, it takes forever to start and to sequence thru the images.

Image clarity = OK

would not buy again.

Very clear pictures. Fairly easy to set up.I used a compact flash memory card that came with a Canon camera.I was able to transfer pictures stored on my PC to the blank card easily,insert it in the frame and it was all ready to use.

I was happy with the frame out of the box. It had acceptable picture quality for the price and I felt it was a good value. But product degraded over the first 100 days. Week 5 a single green line appeared on the right side of the screen, at day 60, 3 more appeared. An email and phone message call to Support recieved no reply (would only accept message no chance to talk to a human). Day 101 the entire right third of the frame died. I have call 3 more times and left 3 more message over the last month without response. My recommendation is to spend a little more money and purchase from an extablished name. I cannot recommend this product of manufacturer. One addtional note, the website I purchase it from said it had a 1 year warrenty. Inside the box was a note which stated the warrenty period had been reduced to 90 days. Not a good indication of quality. I should have realized a possible issue at the beginning.

this product is pretty good. i bought one for me and my girlfriend and it works great except for a few things....it does not store memory and i thought it did. i bought a flash drive which was silver i got it for 10 bucks and that was a good price, but when youy turn the frame on you always have to go to setup and select the usb drive...if i invented it i would automatically have it start playing when it was in....otherwise it's a good product to own unless you wanna buy a flash drive along with it so you don't have to keep pulling out your memory card.

A really cool digital picture frame, very simple to use and supports all types of memory cards even a pen drive.

I set up my dad's computer with a screensaver slide show of all the pictures on his computer, and he often comments on how much he enjoys it. So when I saw this frame for a good price I read the reviews and decided to go for it.

The product looked good out of the box and I spent a bit of time test-loading 10 or so pictures onto an SD card to see how they looked on the screen, especially after following the resizing and cropping instructions posted in the other Amazon reviews. Very satisfied with the results, and comfortable with the procedure, I proceeded to resize and crop nearly 800 pictures to load onto a 1GB SD card - what a chore! The resizing took less than a minute - cropping the pictures took me forever.

Anyway, then I had problems. First I tried to load all the pictures onto the root drive of the SD card - no dice. Not a problem of the card or frame, but I'd forgotten I needed to reformat the card to FAT32 vs. FAT file structure before a root directory limitation could be overcome. I then loaded all the pictures onto the root directory of the reformatted card, and tried it out - no dice (just said 'loading...'). I then moved all the pictures to a subdirectory - still no good, with the same 'loading' message coming up, even after waiting 10 minutes or so.

My problem was pretty much solved when I found a Compact Flash card and put all the pictures on that - this time the frame read the pictures fine, and all is well, for the most part (see below). I'm therefore under the impression, both from my experience and a couple other reviews I read, that an SD card is not the preferred way to go with this frame, at least in my experience.

One other less critical problem has yet to be resolved. My dad, who likes the frame, wanted to be able to just pull an SD card out of his camera after taking a few pictures and see them displayed (with the black bars). He tried it with his Kodak camera, and the few pictures failed to load - the screen just goes black (not even 'loading...'). I pulled an SD card of my Canon camera, and it worked fine. Not sure if this is related to my other problems with SD cards, or if it has to do with the way the camera formats the card and directory structure, but I'm disappointed my dad can't do what he wanted to.

By the way, if anyone has any insight into my somewhat minor problems, comments would sure be appreciated!

This frame looks great until you turn it on. The picture quality is less than stellar, but that isn't what annoyed me about this frame. When you buy this frame don't expect to view your photos at the 16:9 ratio without some work in a photo manipulation program. What does that mean you ask? That means that your photos won't fill the entire screen in the 4:3 mode. You will have 2 black bars on either side of your images; This will not take advantage of the entire frame. If you switch to the 16:9 mode your images will stretch to the width of the frame, making peoples faces distorted. I have a workaround for those who are familiar with image manipulation. See below.

The build quality of the frame is pretty good. If Mustek would fix the 16:9 problem and get a better quality screen, this would be a nice little frame.

A little work is evolved setting up the pictures for the 16:9 ratio, but I figured it out. 16:9 stretches the image, making it look distorted. These steps compensate for the stretch and make your images appear normal. I set up a macro in Photoshop allowing me to do a batch in one click of the mouse. You will just need to keep an eye out on how it crops the image. Some of your images might be better served one at a time.

Start with an image that is 1024x768 in your image editing program.

1. Go to the image size menu and change the width of the image to 77% (or 788 pixels)

This will make the image look distorted. That is ok.

2. Then go to the canvas size menu and crop the height of the image to 77% (or 591 pixels)

The image is ready to save. You might want to save as in to another folder so you
can go back to your original if needed.

3. Copy your edited images on to the flash card and insert into the frame.

The picture quality is decent for the price. However, this frame CANNOT do slideshow while having music playing in the background simultaneously which was a big drawback for me. If you only care about pictures then this frame is fine.

I noticed there aren't any pictures of my Mom around after her passing. So I decided to have her pictures displayed, but instead of printing and framing a lot of it, I decided to get a digital display. I got this digital photo viewer for a lot less than what others are charging and this didn't disappoint. The 16x9 aspect ratio is not the best since you have to convert your pictures to 480x234 for it to fit perfectly without stretching. Cameras don't take anamorphic shots even with widescreen. Other than that, I left the pics at high resolution and allowed for some stretching to view at 16x9. The brightness is crisp and you have to play with the controls to get used to. Music does not play while photos are being viewed. Maybe more expensive brands does the trick. I figured i can always turn a music player on if I want to listen to music. At 7"viewable screen, it's good enough. I'd recommend this for the price alone if you are looking for a simple photo viewer that doesn't involve a lot of gadgetry.

I have been using this frame to display 2000+ of my digital images on the desk of my office. Here are my comments:

Pluses:

1. Excellent brightness, contrast, color saturation, and viewing angle. The Mustek frame uses a LCD TV type panel that has much better brightness, contrast, and color, compared to the computer monitor type LCD panels. The trade off is lower resolution. The Mustek frame has resolution of only about 480x240 vs. at least 640x48 for most computer monitor type panels. But my experience of actually seeing images on this frame for a while is that Mustek made the right trade-off to use the TV type panels. I have compared the Mustek frame with another frame that apparently uses computer display type of LCD panel. The other frame had much better image details when viewed at book reading distance. But at a viewing distance of 3 feet, the images on the Mustek frame were much better. The images on the other frame were dark. The color was not nearly as vivid. The viewing angle was also much limited compared to the Mustek frame.
2. Excellent transition between the images. The transition is fast and smooth compared to the other frame.

Negatives:

1. Strange display mode. The Mustek frame has a native display format of 16:8 but displays only 4:3 images. You have two choices to display the 4:3 images. One is to use only the center part of the LCD panel to display the 4:3 images and leave the two sides of the wide screen blank, much the same as viewing a normal TV images on a wide screen TV set. The other choice is to have the images stretched out horizontally to fill the width of the screen, distorting the images significantly. Making subjects in the pictures short and fat. A much better choice would be to crop the top and the bottom of the 4:3 images to make an undistorted 16:9 images. It is strange that the Mustek frame does not offer this choice. So you have either a full screen display of distorted images or partial screen display. Neither looked good. To solve this problem, one has to pre-distort the 4:3 images to 1:1 images by stretching the pictures height wise and then cropped the top and the bottom of the stretched images to make them 4:3. The Musteck frame can display these pre-stretched images as undistorted 16:9 images. This is a fair amount of trouble to take each time you want to display any new images. There are some free software tools that do an excellent job of batch processing images to stretch and crop them for Mustek frame display. The two I found to be the best are the FastStone Batch Resizer for batch resizing and stretching the images, and the BIMPLite for batch cropping the stretched images. I used a three- step process. In the first step, all the images were resized to 1024x768 using the FastStone tool preserving the aspect ratio. This makes all the images, regardless of the original size and aspect ratio, 4:3 images. In the second step, the images from the first step were batch resized to 640x640 forcing aspect ratio, this is done using the BIMPLite since the FastStone tool could not do aspect ratio change. In the third step, the 640x640 pre-stretched images were cropped down to 640x480 using the FastStone tool. I found 640x480 images to have a slight better quality than 480x320 images on the Mustek frame. I don't know why.

Overall I am happy with the display quality of the Mustek frame. I wish Mustek would provide a firmware update, if can be done, to provide the display mode of cropping the 4:3 images to 16:9 instead of stretching.

This frame is just ok you have to resize all your pictures and the quality is not good at all you are just better off paying the extra $75 and getting the phillips

We are very pleased with the product. We had recently purchased another brand and ended up returning it for the Mustek PF-A7005. It is easy to use. We like the idea of being able to use a regular flash drive.

I read through all the reviews here at Amazon, the best being the one from J Rueffer. He accurately explains how to get the best output from the frame, I followed his instructions and my pictures display perfect with no black sidebars.
The compact flash compatibility is great, so is the USB port, although a usb drive sticking out looks sort of ugly, so compact flash or SD card is the way to go. I managed to put about 1000+ pictures on a 128mb card if you follow the instructions from J Rueffer about sizing them down.
The only reason I gave this frame a 4/5 is because the mp3 compatibility works fine, but it would be great if it could play simultaneously while showing the pictures. However, the music plays separately, which is kind of silly. Overall, for the price, this is a great frame and it works fine for the last month that i've had it.

I had read reviews of the Mustek Dig Pic Frame prior to purchasing. It is the third digital frame I have purchased. It is the second best of the three. Quite a few of the reviews of the frame were negative. I feel that those reviewers had unrealistic expectations. Unlike the very first frame I purchased, I didn't need to modify my images' brightness or contrast for the frame to properly display the images. I also didn't resize my images, so they did not fill the entire frame when displaying. Resizing to fill the frame would have been too time consuming as the original images were composed for other media. I find that the frame displays them well, and adheres to the original compositions and perspectives. Colors are rendered accurately. The images were all about 150 to 450 kb in size and there is no noticeable lag in load time. All in all, the Mustek Digital Picture Frame is adequate, and a good value for the low price.

I purchased this item as a Christmas gift and while it was a very good price for a 7" picture frame, I should've know that "you get what you pay for". The quality of the images in the frame were not good quality. I tried tweaking the brightness and contrast for a better view but to no avail. I was very disappointed with the display of the images from a memory card and from a USB flash drive. If you want a frame to display scenery then it may be ok for you but if you are wanting to view pictures with detail like vacations, celebrations, special occassion then forget it.

Not sure how anyone decided they liked this frame. I own and have gifted several other digital frames from several major and off brand manufacturers and yes, I paid close to double (and in one case four times, but that was for a much larger screen,) but was basically happy with the results. For the price at the Black Friday sale I was willing to put up with the lower resolution and the odd (for digital pictures) 16:9 size. However, if you keep it in 3:4 mode, it will not use the whole frame. To use the whole frame, you need to specially prepare your pictures in a distorted format. To use the frame in a portrait orientation, the way I use most of mine, you have to prepare your pictures rotated 90 degrees counter clock wise. The device saves almost no settings at all, and does not operate on a battery - something all my other frames feature and which is very handy for taking your photos off the wall/mantel wherever and holding them in a comfy chair when visitors stop by. If you use it in the default 3:4 frame and put full size pictures from you camera on the device, it will be blank between pictures for sometimes several seconds while it scales them. It does a poor job of scaling even then, I've had it leave almost half the screen space blank around the shrunken image for no good reason I could determine, which with the relatively low resolution of the screen leaves the photos almost unrecognizable. It even does that with pictures that I've specially down sampled to fit on the frame but weren't the exact screen size due to cropping. Frustrating to say the least. The same SD card with the pictures direct from camera and specially adapted for this frame played back perfectly in my other frames. The MP3 playback feature is useless as it will not play music at the same time as the photos, and the sound quality is so bad you really wouldn't want it to anyway. No video playback at all though I didn't expect that at this price. Having subsequently evaluated several other digital frames based on portable DVD screens before buying them, I have to say that just about anyone would be better off saving up a little more and getting one of the digital picture frames designed for the purpose. Some people have said that what do you expect for the price? I expect better than this. People happy with it have obviously never had a real digital picture frame that worked properly. Even for the money this isn't worth it by a long shot.

Gave this gift to all the grandparents to show off our pictures of our two girls! They absolutely loved this! The pictures are good quality and the price is great. It has a nice look to it also, doesn't look cheap or cheesy.

I bought this digital picture frame "Mustek PF-A700B 7-inch" as a Christmas gift. Since I wasn't sure what type memory card they had I was glad this frame came with a USB slot so that a flash drive could be used to store the photos. I resized photos and was able to get over 300 pictures on a 32mb flash drive and still had plenty of room to add more. The quality of the photos were great. The gift was a huge success and since they owned a Kodak camera they could stick their memory card in the camera too. They tried it out while I was there and it was easy as pie. The photos didn't need to be resized because they only had a 4MP camera. Now I would like a digital picture frame myself.

Transaction was great but product was not high quality We compared it to another digital picture frame that was $30 more and it was like a comparison between the Dollar Store and Macy's. Pay the extra money for the quality....it makes a total difference.

Thanks!

Resize images to 620x342 and then shrink the width by 77%.
Change the ratio to 16:9 in the frame.
The image fits the frame perfectly.

Use high resolution with same ratio as 620x342 and picture looks really good.
I am using the random transition, the picture quality, transition... everything looks great.

Its a great product in this price range.

I am using Xnview and generated a script to crop and resize, so no hassle to shrink images one by one. All I need to do now is select the images and run the script.

it does the job, just remember, theres no internal memory...youre going to need to get an sd card to go with it.

I picked this for my wife for a Christmas gift and she loves it. We put it on the back of our piano and it looks really nice. Great quality display and with the memory card slots, we can change the photos anytime we want to. This was my wife's favorite gift for Christmas.

Bought this for my mother for Christmas. I read the reviews that said the resolution was bad but it looks perfectly fine to me. No it's not HDTV quality but I wasn't expecting that. Images are clear enough for anyone to make out. I'm using a 128Mb Sony MS and most of the photos are 3mp images from digital camera. I didn't have to resize the images, I just drag and drop to the stick, no problem. If I start to run out of room I can always resize to save storage space later. I don't like that this frame doesn't have a randomize function, it just shows images in alphabetical order. The display is continuous. I set it to NOT repeat, but it just cycles through the images over and over. I'd like to see where you could leave it on but have to press a button to run through the images once. Maybe I missed it in the instructions, but I'm pretty intuitive about my gadgets.

I received the PF-A700B in a timely manner. The instructions need to be more clear. I should have realized that 7" wide means measured diagonally. My wife and I agree that the picture is not a good quality. The picture on the box shows a full screen picture in proportion, however pictures taken with an 8MP camera in JPEG format yeilds only a 4 1/4 wide by 3 3/8 height picture on the screen. Resizing the pricture to different resolution does not improve the size of the picture on the screen. Setting the mode to 16:9 stretches the people face and body way out of proportion. I did not try the MP3 music out. I do believe that Mustek is correct in saying that it will support up to 12MP JPEG pictures.
Overall I would say that for $89.95 that this not a good choice. The Digital Photo frames are too new on the market and hard to see what they look. Wal-Mart,Target,Radio Shack physically tie them down and do not show them powered up. Wait several years and the models will improve and come down in price.

Requires a little setup, not quite just plu and play. Still can't get it to use the full widescreen. looks cool though, friends love it

I got this product as a Christmas gift for my mother. She loves it. As she is technically challenged person, navigating the settings menu may be a challenge at first but overall its a great for its cost. I found this to be quite a bit cheaper than competing models of the same size.

This item was purchased without even seeing it in a store or anything. The price was too good to pass up, so I expected a fade in quality because it was so much less than the name brand digital frames. Boy was I wrong. Great features, excellent picture quality. A must for family photos, enjoy!

I gave this to my brother for Christmas and my husband saw how intrigued I was with it and surprised me with one also.

At first, I went and edited all pictures to fulfill the pixel requirements, but then just went ahead and added a bunch without any changes to size. All my picture load great. I set it up to random affects, changing slides every 5 seconds. There are no delays. The picture quality is better on those pictures I did not resize - very sharp. You want to set the mode to 16:9 to fill the frame.

I love it and would highly recommend it.

I wish I had seen the other reviews on this site before I spent hours figuring out why my photos didn't display correctly and how to resize them to work.

The cropping and resizing is definitely NOT user friendly - the comments about "unrealistic expectations" are a little harsh, since nobody should expect a photo frame to distort their images. Users have to be fairly computer-savvy to set up photos to display properly on this frame - it is NOT for beginners.

I also found that if I put more than 250 photos on my 256MB SD card the frame will not recognize any of them at all.

It seems to have a limit of 250 photos. At the native resolution of the frame this translates to MUCH less than my 256MB card can hold so definitely don't waste your money on larger memory cards if you can rustle up an old card. Anything over 64MB is probably fine.

Tech support is literally nonexistent - this product is not listed at all on the Mustek site except for sale.

But it is cheap, and I finally got it to work, and it wowed my mother-in-law on Xmas!

This product is great. I bought it for my mom for Christmas and she loves it. It gets the job done for a reasonable price. It's a perfect gift for family living far away to be kept up-to-date. The quality is just fine, I mean come on it's $90! Because of its price, you can't expect to have extremely HIGH expectations, such as a remote control or flawless picture quality; however, if you're looking for a reasonably priced digital photo frame that gets the job done, this is it. As long as you have a USB flash drive, or SD card and card reader (preferred because the flash drive will stick out), simply upload your photos and you're good to go.

Many people complained about seeing a black background, but the photos can be stretched to display on the entire screen, you just have to adjust the LCD settings. People have also complained about the buttons being on the back, but you only use the buttons for the initial adjustment of the settings (when you open the box and read the instructions). Once your settings are saved, just turn it on and the slide show starts. I highly recommend this product. Hey, if it was good enough for my mom, it's good enough for anyone.