My new fantastic smart photo frame - NixPlay Seed

I’ve always loved displaying photos in our house, and when NixPlay asked me if I wanted to review their flagship NixPlay Seed photo frame I jumped at the opportunity. NixPlay Seed is a digital Wi-Fi based photo frame, a smart frame if you like, where you can upload photos via an app direct from your phone, from your desktop and also by sending them via an email link. I chose the 10.1 inch widescreen frame in black – but there are also 8 inch frames available in black, blue, yellow and maroon, and 10 inch ultra high resolution and 13.3 inch widescreen frames in black too.  

So far I've really enjoyed my frame. I've added all my summer photos on it, and the bright display with the crisp colours has been fantastic to display those vibrant summer vibes. The bright blues and greens of summer are captured perfectly and the pictures are bright and eye-catching. And best of all - any time I manage to take a gorgeous photo of our summer exploits, I can easily transfer it direct to the frame using my phone or my desktop. 

How was the set-up process?

You set the NixPlaySeed up via Wi-Fi. Fairly simple process which felt intuitive and quick. Basically as soon as I turned on the frame it guided me through the process. There was a strange hiccup at first, making me think something was wrong, as the frame would not sync with my app despite both being connected to Wi-Fi. In the end it sorted itself out by an automatic software update after a short wait. After it is set-up, the frame can be used and setting changes via the app or the remote control. 

Is it easy to transfer photos to the frame?

In one word - yes! Very very easy. You need an app or a desktop version to begin with and to set your account and pair the frame to it. After that you can transfer photos direct to the frame from your phone using the app, from your desktop (using the online version) or sending it direct to the frame using an email (you get assigned a special email as you create your NixPlay account). This can be used by friends and family as well to send pictures direct to your frame. It's pretty cool! You can add friends and family as account holders as well so they can use the app if they prefer.  

Oh yes, and you can transfer short (15 second or less) videos as well, which is pretty cool. 

What's the quality like? 

The display quality is great - high resolution ISP display. Photos look very sharp and with good colours. The quality of the frame seems good. You use the charging wire as the stand and this seems to be working fine, and streamlines the design a bit. 

Are there any cool functions?

After playing around with the frame a bit I must say I really liked the smart features it has. 

I dislike the black bars you sometimes get when the photo doesn't exactly correspond to the frame ratio. With the NixPlay frame you can modify the photos so they automatically fit to the screen. You can also ask it to recognise faces and place these in the thirds of the photo. This function works pretty well, albeit not perfectly. Occasionally photos, despite the best efforts, are still cut in strange places. This tends to mostly happen when you play portrait photos in landscape or vice versa. 

Other cool function is that you can fix the colour balance on the frame, so if the photos look a bit odd you can play around with them. 

I also really liked the snooze function and motion sensor function - you can set the frame to go to sleep if it doesn't detect movement for a while. While it is snoozing you can have the screen black or showing a clock. And when you do walk in front of it - on the photo roll goes again. 

Playlists seem like an interesting option too - so you can have rolls of differently themed photos. I'll at some point set up a portrait photo roll and a landscape photo roll, but you could do themes like holidays, or wedding photos or whatever you fancy. One playlist can hold 2,000 photos, and the cloud holds about 5gb data so there is plenty of space! 

Are there any bad points about NixPlay Seed 10.1 widescreen frame? 

As it is a cloud-based system it is reliant on Wi-Fi (I haven't tested yet how it works with no Wi-Fi around...). Not that our Wi-Fi is often down, but I guess we will see next time. Also, all the photos are transferred via the Cloud-based system. Great idea but if NixPlay ever went out of business, then what would happen with this functionality? This frame doesn't support SD cards, USB sticks or bluetooth, so the cloud is the only option. It would be great to have that back-up of either physical storage option. 

And this is not really a bad point, but more of a matter of preferences. In my opinion widescreen version might not be the best for a digital photo frame size if you use your phone camera a lot. 

Firstly, the widescreen 10.1 version looks a bit peculiar in portrait mode, it looks just a bit too thin and tall. Realistically you will probably only use it in landscape mode, but if you might find that if yo'u use your phone camera a lot, you tend to shoot in portrait. Secondly, as the frame ratio is 16:10 and phone camera ratio is generally 3:4 they might not match well. I personally have changed my phone camera ratio to 16:9 now so my phone photos should fit better here on in. 

So it's a matter of preferences and your habits - if you use your phone camera as your primary camera and have a lot of portrait photos you might be better off with one of the more traditional NixPlay See frames, perhaps a 8 inch or 10 inch version. Otherwise, the widescreen version does look fantastic when used landscape and gives that extra oomph to photos. 

But all in all I've been very please with my new frame from Nixplay. It is smart, great quality and very easy to use. I'm looking forward to adding more and more colourful photos  to it over the summer. It is a great way to bring the seasons in your interiors, just by updating the photos you are using in the frame!

Have you had a smart digital frame yet?

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