Editorial Reviews : Ceiva put the future in an unassuming black picture frame with this amazingly simple yet innovative product. This Internet-enabled frame makes it so easy to receive and display digital photos that even the most tech-shy relatives will love it. The traditional frame houses an LCD screen that displays up to 20 pictures in a single-view or slide-show format. Once a day, the frame dials in to Ceiva's Web site and downloads any new photos that have been sent to you (or that you've uploaded). What's truly amazing is that it works flawlessly--it's a cutting-edge technology idea that's well executed. The frame itself is a handsome classic black with a black matte. It's about the size of a standard 8-by-10-inch frame, and the viewing area is about 5 by 7 inches. The display resolution is 640 x 480 VGA, and the images are displayed as JPEGs. We were impressed with the picture quality, especially considering the display is passive matrix--colors were a bit washed out, but otherwise pictures were sharp, bright, and looked good. The viewing angle isn't great--you won't be able to see pictures well from the side--but overall, the screen worked very well, even in relatively bright light.
You do the bulk of your setup online at Ceiva's Web site. Here, you can lock, delete, upload, or send photos, and you can adjust the rest of your settings, such as the slide-show interval or the time the Ceiva turns off the display every night. (The standard setting shuts it off from 12 a.m. to 4 a.m.) Within your account, you can choose who can send pictures to you (your 'Buddy list'). Your buddies don't need to own Ceiva photo frames, but they have to get Ceiva accounts, which are free. In addition to photos, you and your friends can send and receive any kind of digital image, from hand-drawn cards to scanned art. Subscription channels even let you get comics, weather and traffic reports, and horoscopes on a daily basis. Ceiva's site also provides simple tools to add messages to your photos.
The controls on the Ceiva are extremely easy to use--there is one button that adjusts brightness and another button to stop the slide show and dial-up on demand. If you want to download pictures immediately (for instance, right after your mother calls and tells you she just sent a new batch), you press and hold the settings button on the frame until it connects.
You don't need an extra telephone line to use the Ceiva--the photo frame uses your existing line for just a few minutes every night. Ceiva provides a Y-connector in the box to make it easy for you to plug the frame into your phone jack without disconnecting your phone. The photo frame also doesn't require you to have an Internet connection to download photos, although a subscription is required to download photos. The subscription costs $79.95 per year to maintain this service via a local connection, and multi-year plans are available starting at less than $5 a month. However, if you want to upload pictures, send them to other people's Ceivas, or modify certain frame settings, you'll need to use an Internet connection.
Overall, our experience using the Ceiva was simply wonderful. It's intended to be simple to use, and it does a great job receiving and displaying photos. It strikes us as the perfect gift for your Mom and Dad, your grandparents, or any long-distance friend who is computer-shy. Not to mention that the Ceiva photo frame is just plain cool!
Buyer Reviews : I just got one to give to my technophobe mom on Mother's Day. I am extremely impressed. It's attractive; it looks far more like a picture frame than an electronic device. The photo quality, while not quite as good as an average computer monitor, is quite respectable. It was extremely easy to set up and get working. And it works perfectly.
The frame cycles between 20 pictures that you've uploaded to the Ceiva web site, showing each for between 5 seconds and 2 hours (the time is up to you). It downloads new pictures from the web site automatically every night; you can also force it to download immediately. You can store up to 1000 (I think) pictures on the web site, and the frame will rotate them, choosing 20 different ones each day. You can also tell it to keep pictures until further notice, or have it choose one picture randomly each day from each of 20 albums that you establish online, or show 'channels' like the local weather and prime-time TV schedule, or any combination of the above.
You can send photos in JPEG or several other formats. Ceiva's web site recommends editing photos to increase color saturation and contrast, and decrease brightness, in order to optimize their appearance on the frame (as opposed to on your monitor). I think their advice is correct, but I don't want to bother saving 2 versions of each photo, one for me and one for my mom's frame; the quality is still pretty good. Ceiva also recommends saving in 640x480 pixels, but I've found that larger pictures (both slightly larger and way larger) look just as good, so I don't bother saving a small version just for the frame. (I have a fast web connection, so I don't mind the time it takes to upload the image from my PC. I'm not sure whether this results in longer time for Ceiva to download photos to the frame, but I suspect that they convert them to 640x480 before downloading them.)
Now the drawbacks:
- It's expensive. ....
- The image quality could be better.
- Th image must be viewed pretty much straight on, not at much of an angle.
- The person with the frame can do very little. Basically all they can do (besides enjoy the show) is change the brightness and force an immediate download. Anything else, including telling it what hours to go dark at night, how long to show each picture, what pictures to change the next day, or your changed phone number, must be done on their web site. The assumption is that if the owner doesn't have a PC, he/she doesn't want to get involved with these things. That's probably the case most of the time, so I think this is a reasonable design, but there are probably some users who want to do more. Also, if there are connection problems, it can be cumbersome to troubleshoot and correct them with so little control from the frame.
- The web site user interface is confusing. It's actually pretty powerful once you figure it out, but it's way too hard to figure out.
- Of course, you need your photos in digital form to send them to Ceiva's web site. If you already do digital, this is no problem. If you will have to start doing this just so you can send them to Ceiva, that's additional time and expense that you need to factor in.
- The frame comes in your choice of colors, so long as your choice is black.
- Other users have complained of hardware problems. Most of those seem to show up right away, so you can reduce the problem by getting the unit in advance and trying it out before giving it as a gift. But the number of complaints I've seen seems rather high.
I expect that most or all of these problems will be fixed over time. The price will inevitably come down, and Ceiva's web site suggests that a new model this summer will accept pictures directly from memory cards rather than requiring a service subscription. (Some competitive products already do this.) Display technology, of course, keeps improving. Their web site promises an improved UI in a few weeks. And it
