IPEVO Kaleido 7 Wireless Digital Picture Frame Review

One of the great things about Twitter, is that you never know what opportunities will appear. A company called IPEVO put the call out to photography bloggers via the #photog hashtag which I follow. They were looking for people interested in reviewing their wireless digital photo frame. I eagerly put my hand up and within a week or two, this gorgeous piece of engineering turned up on my doorstep:

First impressions

The first thing you notice about the Kaleido 7 (or KR7) once you take it out of its environmentally friendly packaging and remove the plastic protectors on every surface, is how gorgeous it is. This is design from the school of Mac. Shiny black surfaces, minimalist design, high quality construction. It feels nice and weighty in the hand, and inspires confidence that it won’t go tumbling off whatever surface you keep it on. The screen does a couple of nifty tricks. It can rotate ninety degrees to go from landscape to portrait, which is detected by the frame, and the display rotates to compensate. It also has a small vertical tilt, ample for mounting the frame both above and below eye level to present the best viewing angle.

The second thing you notice is that it’s rather complicated and a bit unfriendly to set up. Before you can use the frame for anything, you need to install the included software on your computer and “pair” or sync the device with the software via a wireless network. This isn’t an especially difficult task for the technically savvy, but I suspect it would be a challenge for the “typical” digital photo frame user. The early – and it turns out, lasting – impression, is that this is a digital photo frame for geeks.

Once you have the pairing set up, then you can enjoy looking at photos on the beautiful seven inch screen. One of the shortcomings of most digital frames I have seen is the woeful screen resolution. There is no such problem with the K7. Photos are crisp and clear, beautifully vibrant, thanks to the LED backlight, and a pleasure to behold.

Software Shortcomings

Aside from the gorgeous screen, the main feature of this frame is its wireless connectivity. The advantage to this is that you can connect the frame to the internet, via your wireless network and the software installed on your computer, to look at an essentially unlimited number of photos. You can also stream photos from your hard drive to the frame. However, the only photos you get to look at, at first, are some sample streams from Flickr. If you want to see your own photos, then you have a little more work to do. Again, the process isn’t too painful or difficult for a technically literate person, but even I had to try a few times to get things set up how I liked. You can of course plug in a memory card with your photos, but I do not use any of the card formats supported, so I cannot review this feature.

The main problem I had with the frame was its software, both in the application on the computer and the interface on the frame itself. While the frame itself looks as beautiful as an apple product, the interface and software looks well and truly like a windows app. By that I mean that the software is functional and usable, but not intuitive or especially attractive. It can be confusing to understand the “Channels” and “Gallery” concepts used. Setting up new sources for imagery can be hard to grasp, especially when using your hard disk as the source – which is how I used the device almost exclusively. Matters became even more complicated when I tried the IPEVO IPhone app to control the frame. Syncing between the various devices had to be broken and remade whenever I wanted to change the controlling device. Sometimes syncing failed after powering off the frame.

I should emphasises again, that for technically capable people, these are minor inconveniences, but I can just imagine how often I might be called by family for help, when they inadvertently cause problems through the unintuitive software and cause the frame to become “stuck” displaying a single photo, or some such problem.

What I like about it

• The absolutely gorgeous design and constructon of the frame. It’s beautiful to look at.
• The screen, while smallish, is vibrant, crisp, colourful and high resolution.
• The wireless feature lets you display unlimited photos on the frame, without even touching it, once set up.
• The ability to flip the frame between landscape and portrait orientations is very nice.
• The ability to display any appropriately formatted RSS feed content alows for a huge variety of content to be relatively easily displayed on the screen.
• The multiple control options: Desktop software, IR remote, on-frame controls, iPhone app; let you take control of the frame via whatever method suits you best, though with some shortcomings.
• I like how you can set a timer for when the frame goes to sleep and wakes up.

Suggested improvements

• I’m not a software usability expert, but I think much can be done to improve the ease of use of the K7’s software, and to make it look prettier.
• I’d like better controls for adding images from the hard disk drive. As it is, you can add directories, and one level of sub directories. I’d like to see fine control, with individual directories, deep subdirectories and individual files being able to be selected for display.
• The ability to create “playlists” of images to be saved and later selected to be played would be a wonderful addition.
• I’d like to see an option to automatically hide or skip photos which don’t match the orientation of the frame. It would prevent the unfortunate shrinking of images to fit them on the frame.
• Better randomisation of local photos being displayed would be great. Whenever the frame is turned on, it always seems to default to the same directory of photos.
• It’s hard to expect a supercomputer in a photo frame, but responsiveness is sluggish, with there typically being a second between keypress and menu change, as well as several seconds to change between slideshows.
• With the iPhone app, I’d like to be able to control the streaming of photos from my desktop, but the nature of the software/hardware relationship means any local images must be stored on the device controlling it.

Conclusion and Recommendation

I think the K7 is a remarkable piece of hardware. It is attractive, functional and excels at the task of displaying photos beautifully. The wireless feature is wonderful and turns the frame into a window on the world, or into your archive of photos on your local computer. However, the control system and software are complicated, especially for people who are not very confident with computers.

Bottom line: Do I think this digital photo frame is worth the $200 asking price? For me, it’s a very close thing. If it were a 10 inch screen, rather than a seven inch one, then absolutely yes. As it is now, however, I think I would personally choose to hold off a generation in the hopes of getting a bigger screen for the money. I am a photographer, however, and excessively fussy about how my photos are displayed. For most people, a seven inch screen, which is still larger than the traditional 6×4 print size, is probably enough.

If you do buy the Kaleido 7, one thing is for sure, your photos will look gorgeous, as will the frame itself, wherever it’s displayed.

The Specs