Ceiva Digital Photo Receiver

Description

Product Description The Ceiva Digital Photo Receiver offers a great way to share digital pictures with parents, grandparents, or non-technical friends and family. The Ceiva makes a great gift because the recipient needs no computer skills or Internet access! You manage the pictures yourself at the Ceiva Website and all Grandma and Grandpa have to do is push a button to see your latest offerings. You upload your latest photos to the Ceiva Website as frequently as you'd like and once a day the Ceiva receiver automatically downloads new photos and displays them in full color in slideshow for your loved ones to enjoy. Pictures are sharp and bright at a resolution of 640x480 pixels with thousands of colors. Picture management options include lock, delete, upload and send. Adjustable settings include the slideshow interval and timed shutoff. The photo receiver plugs easily into a phone jack without disconnecting the phone with the provided Y-connector. Receiver: 8Lx10W". Viewing area: 5Lx7W". Click on Help at the top of the page, then on Product Rebates where you can download the rebate form. desertcart.com 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 $5 a month. However, if you want to upload pictures, send them to other people's Ceivas, or modify certain frame settings, you'll need to use an Internet connection. Overall, our experience using the Ceiva was simply wonderful. It's intended to be simple to use, and it does a great job receiving and displaying photos. It strikes us as the perfect gift for your mom and dad, your grandparents, or any long-distance friend who is computer-shy. Not to mention that the Ceiva photo frame is just plain cool! --Michael LewisPros: Extremely easy to use Good picture quality No existing Internet account necessary Others can send you pictures for free Cons: You must adjust most of your settings on the Web site P.when('A').execute(function(A) { A.on('a:expander:toggle_description:toggle:collapse', function(data) { window.scroll(0, data.expander.$expander[0].offsetTop-100); }); }); From the Manufacturer The Ceiva digital photo receiver will be the best gift you ever give. We get letters every day telling us what a difference a Ceiva Receiver has made in the lives of the many grandparents, aunts, uncles and parents who receive daily pictures of the grandchildren and family. The Receiver's owner doesn't need a computer to receive and display great digital photos. It's simple to set up--once a Ceiva Receiver is registered, the owner of the Receiver just plugs in the power and the phone line, presses one button, and from then on, up to 20 new pictures of the grandkids can appear automatically as a slide show every morning. If you are giving the Ceiva Receiver as a gift, you can register the Receiver before you send it, so it's all ready to go. The Ceiva Receiver is designed to resemble a picture frame, with a sleek 8 x 10-inch design that fits in with all decors. How does the Ceiva Receiver Work? The Receiver automatically makes a short local call through an existing phone line each night to get pictures sent to it. There's no interruption to current phone service, and no toll charges. It's silent and secure. Each Ceiva Receiver requires a monthly subscription. Low monthly rates cover all needed processing, storage and transmission costs for receiving photos, and allow unlimited sending of photos from family and friends. We recently received a copy of a thank you letter sent to one of our customers from his grandmother, who said: "As I sit in my big, comfortable chair, I watch television and look at my picture frame. I see your pictures as they pass by, and it makes me so happy that I lived to be able to enjoy this invention in technology. Thanks so much for caring enough to make this time in my life such a happy one." See more Review: Poor product with abysmal customer service - I have purchased Ceiva digital photo receiver as a gift for my mother for Christmas.... I take a lot of pictures with my digital camera. Be prepared to do some editing work on your pictures since chances are they will not display properly in the form that you are using on your PC or the internet. You will have to adjust size of picture, brightness, contrast, color saturation, and have an ability to save the picture file in a low resolution format to make the physical file smaller. After all, the unit is using a basic modem, and downloading 20 pictures x 500K will take time (you do the math). Even after laboring for hours in Photoshop and finally getting the pictures to the unit I was very disappointed with the results. Unless the picture has an absolutely perfect lighting and color combination it will not look nearly as well as it does on PC monitor. Don't be fooled by sample pictures displayed on Ceiva packaging boxes, commercials, etc. The pictures that looked very sharp and colorful on PC looked bleak and a little distorted on Ceiva. If you look at display at close distance then you will notice the pixels and slight shimmering of the screen. If you look from a far then the screen is just too small to see the photo well.<P... Review: FANTASTIC! - I bought 8 - for me, husband at work, daughter at college, son at his home, and my four brothers and their families. Now I'm trying to buy another for my aunt. I love it! The picture is bright and detailed, the instructions are extremely user-friendly, and all eight of us can upload pictures to any or all of the other frames in the family! I also bought the little JamCam digital cameras that are fairly inexpensive, so that all my family will have the ability to take pictures and upload to our frames. It cost a bit of money to do all this, but now that my kids have moved away from home I treasure photos more than anything else. I did it for me, really! And with 8 of us, we can look forward to frequent uploads from everyone. I saw ads for this some time ago, but I didn't realize the power of sharing until I actually bought mine. It's so much better than email. And we all see the same pictures every day, so there's the fun of knowing everyone else is seeing what I see. You can upload any image - even scanned images or edited photos. That can get to be a lot of fun. Plus, it has other useful options besides photos, but most of that you can get online anyway. The real fun is the photo sharing. It looks nice in any room. You don't need an internet connection - only a phone line. (Unless you want to upload new photos that you have taken, then you need internet.) Easy to set up. Great options on the website control page. You get to store and sort as many albums as you want, up to 1000 pictures per frame owned (so my family gets to store and draw from 8000 pictures). I HIGHLY recommend this, especially if you can afford to buy a lot of them and get the whole family uploading pictures that go to all the frames. I think it's a killer app, as they say.