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The HP 13-inch DreamScreen makes it easy to enjoy photos, music, video, as well as weather, clocks,calendars, Facebook, and more.
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Technical Details
- Enjoy music, photos and videos with easy to use buttons & screens- Control your digital entertainment in the palm of your hand with a simple, intuitive remote.
- Enjoy music, photos and videos easily with the HP MediaSmart experience.
- Built-in Wi-Fi connects seamlessly to your existing wireless home network, so you can access content on your home PCs and through the Internet.
- The HP DreamScreen is a gateway to the Internet using your wireless network to access weather info, Snapfish and your favorite web destinations
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By EmbeddedFlyer (Seattle, WA United States)
Sadly, the digital photo frame market is mostly flooded with no-name products that are seriously lacking in several areas. One would expect a "world class" company like HP could offer a much better product, but so far as several others have reported in their reviews, HP has largely failed. This product looks great on paper but is disappointing in reality.
Consider this: You can buy (from HP no less) a very nice complete netbook computer with a better higher resolution screen, a much faster processor, WiFi, a full keyboard, expensive Li-Ion battery, hard drive, etc. for the SAME PRICE as this photo frame which has none of those things. So why does HP use a substandard 800 pixel display that makes your photos fuzzy? Why do they use a little toy processor that makes everything so slow as to be painful? Why isn't there a motion detector to turn the frame off when nobody has been in the room for a while to save energy?
Why also, isn't this device UPnP-AV or DLNA compliant so it can automatically pull pictures off your PC, NAS or home server? Other less expensive devices offer this functionality. The "internet" features of this device are severely limited. You can buy devices at a third of the price that do much more (but granted have a smaller screen). And you can buy devices at a third of the price with a better, higher resolution screen, than the DreamScreen.
I would suggest waiting until more companies figure out the "high end" digital frame market. There are new wireless offerings from Buffalo, D-Link and others that conform to home media standards (UPnP and/or DLNA) that put the DreamScreen to shame and can do much more. Hopefully such competition will force HP, and others, to get their act together.
By Michael R. Bell
I am not your typical consumer who casually utlizes a purchased product. I generally try to utilze all the given benefits. In this case the impotus for purchasing this overpriced digital photo viewer was the fact that there was remote wireless conectivity to your media PC and that you could listen to the audio files and or view the video or jpg files that were placed into a shared files software that is included with the Dream?Screen. This was a gift for my beloved for Christmas and she is a technophobe in the true sense and I assured her upon receipt of this gift it would be a breeze based upon the desriptions from HP in their sales literature. I had seen some balking about the connectivity in a review and assumed that it was someone who does not understand this technology. Well I am living proof that this is NOT a simple piece of peripheral equipment to use. I have yet to achieve connectivity to the master media PC using my wireless network 802.11N I have installed the appropriate included software and to my dismay it claims that there is no Dream?Screen on my wireless network. I have yet to remedy this challenge. My windows Media Player can find it however I cannot share this audio Media.
By Anthony J. Wheeler (Fort Myers, Florida USA)
The design factor is great - this thing just looks superb - it is very 'apple- like' and fits right in. The touch frame function is cool and the remote is very effective and stores away in a slot on the back of the frame.
Everything is set up very easily including the wi-fi, which took about 30seconds to find our network. We had already set up our Snapfish and Pandora accounts and they both work really well.
You can e mail straight into your account and see the new pictures very quickly. There is also Snapfish iPhone app. which allows you to send multi pictures at one time - great. This would be useful for anyone who wants to send pictures home while they are away. There are a number of ways to show the calendar or use the alarm too and all very easy to use. We also love the weather feature for it's ease of operation.
The sound is adequate but we decided to have a line out to our Onkyo i-pod music doc nearby and the sound is amazing.
We have a new iMac computer - so the streaming deal does not work but we knew that kind of, before we bought it. We hoped that HP would offer an update and we e-mailed and spoke to HP but as of now they have NO plans to update the software to make the Dreamscreen Mac - compatible. This is short sighted of HP because there's almost nothing out there which is able to stream from a Mac.
Some reviewers have complained that they can't access framechannel or picassa or other stuff but then maybe they need a 'tablet' machine and not a digital photo frame. Stop moaning!...This thing looks good and it works really well. We think that it is well featured and a great size (forget all those 7" screens)but it should be able to stream from a Mac.
By TmmyBoy11 (California)
I see some hard core tech guys giving this unit a hard time. I understand their comments and would only suggest they consider the targeted buyer. This is the best network connected picture frame avaialble for the price $200 @ Costco. I would never suggest a digital frame this is not networked. 95% of the folks that buy this unit will be thrilled with it's performance, I am. Some more robust networking features would be nice. But it installs easy, performs nicely, and will really enjoy it. I highly recommend it, and as a elec eng and a fairly techy dude, this is a good recomendation.
By Christopher Evans (Frankfurt am Main, Deutschland)
Lets first just get some things out of the way before I talk about the quality of what the device DOES do lets talk about what it does not, yet claims to do.
Downright Lies
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The following quotes are from the HP site itself:
"The HP DreamScreen is a gateway to the Internet using your wireless network to access
weather info, Snapfish and your favorite web destinations."
This is just untrue. There is no integrated web browser. It has three web `apps' on it: SnapFish, Pandora, Facebook. That's it. It does not read RSS feeds, or do much of anything you probably want it to do, simple things like display news or recipes.
"Stay current with social network sites like Facebook"
`Like' facebook? There is only Facebook: nothing else.
"Be organized with a built-in alarm clock & calendar."
This is laughable. Wondering how to sync the calendar with outlook or google or anything; maybe even just add appointments, I finally consulted their online documentation. Here, seriously, is the feature list for the calendar `app':
"View the current month, press right or left to view the next or previous month."
BWAH HA HA HA... *sigh*
"Touch-enabled controls--Get fast, easy access to information and entertainment with simple touch controls embedded in the display"
This is referring to some buttons around the bezel of the screen and is just so untrue they would have to change the marketing campaign in Europe or get sued. This does however remind me of the old In Living Color sketch where the handcapped superhero always says he is `not handicapped, but HANDY-CAPABLE!'.
"Videos--Watch home movies and video clips in full screen - Its simple!"
It's as simple as taking your video, recompressing it to a supported video codec, resizing it to a specific resolution, and then physically transferring it ot the device -so simple grandma could do it! (with gordian knot, virtualdub, CCCP, and all those other video tools she has)
The Screen
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Resolution
The thing is a frickin' 300 dollar photo frame, but it's resolution is 800 x 480, this equates to 0.38 megapixels, at the time the frame came out, the average cheap point n shoot ranks 9 to 10 megapixels: this is well over twenty times the resolution of the screen!
Because of this, it can take 10 full seconds to load a photo and downsample it to 800 pixels from it's original resolution. This makes browsing photos a pain, and loading photos from your camera cards nearly useless. Power users will use photoshop or xnView to batch all their content to 800 pixels.
There is aliasing galore, as 800 pixels is the resolution of many phones and handheld devices, not 13 photo frames!
NOTE: The official specs on the HP website and elsewhere say the DreamScreen 130 is 800 x 480, however, it's own documentation on the CD is came with claims a resolution of 1280 x 800. I called HP and they confirmed the lower resolution for the DreamScreen 130. There may be a middle road as some sites report: "13.3 Widescreen- 800 x 480 pixels upscaling to 1280 x 800 pixels", which would mean you purchased a 1280×800 screen and they didnt feel like making the software go higher res for the more expensive display. Jesus.
Color Reproduction
It is a cheap TN panel, the gamma of your images widely fluctuates depending on the angle they are viewed. I would be ok if they had a low resolution but used a nice IPS, SIPS, or OLED panel, but this is just unremarkable. The black point is a dark shade of grey, in all seriousness, the panel quality seems on par with something like the panels they use in the dashboard of a Prius, or other industrial UI readouts.
Streaming / Network
Streaming requires lots of Microsoft Windows Media software and services running on a PC server in your house that is always on, they relied on this instead of doing the footwork themselves. If you were under the impression from their marketing that it could read files off samba shares or work with Macintosh, you would be wrong.
Software / User Interface
The software is pretty terrible. It is very clunky and unresponsive. Many times it does not recognize that physical media has been inserted and must be rebooted. The UI graphics themselves show terrible compression artifacts.
When you bring up the on screen keyboard to type in, say, the name of the device, it clearly shows buttons like [HTTP://], [www.], [.com], and others to make it easier to browse the web, however there is no web browser! There are other places in the print ads and UI itself that refer to features the device just does not have!
"Touch Screen"
The device claims to have a `touch sensitive screen', and IT DOES! A small area around the bezel of the screen has botons that can be pressed/touched! This product is in NO WAY a touch screen device, and has no touch sensitivity, other than the buttons on the bezel, the marketing is a lie.
Open Source?
On the CD that ships with it, they have a ton of readme files showing they used a lot of GPL'd code, however the source installer did not work on my windows 7, x64.
Conclusion
Pros:
* They used Linux and GPL'd code so they will have to release theirs soon, hopefully it will be taken under the wing of the open source community and all these issues can be fixed by hard working college students and kids in their spare time.
* The packaging/box is very high quality with a great look and feel
Cons:
* The screen is low res and low quality
* The device is way overpriced for the quality of it's screen and software
* The docs and UI refer to features that just do not exist
* No battery, it must always remain plugged into the wall
* Super-glossy, all you may be seeing is windows!
* Software-wise, the average cellphone is vastly superior in extensibility and quality (browsing photos, playing mp3s, videos...)
* The UI looks like a rip of cell phone UIs, but only in pictures... There are no smooth animated transitions, nothing in common with the user interfaces they seemed to want to copy. To an experienced person, the UI feels like something HP outsourced to Asia and sent them a poor art-bible of the end product they were expecting...
* The device seems unfinished
Images Product
Buy HP DreamScreen 130 13-Inch Wireless Connected Screen Now
