Product Description

Digital Photo Album, 2000 photo capacity, connects to your TV, compatible all popular digital camera media formats

Product Details

• Brand: SanDisk
• Model: SDV2-A-A30
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 2.30" h x 8.40" w x 10.20" l, 1.85 pounds

Features

• Use your TV to view, share, and store digital photos and video clips…no computer needed!
• Store up to 2000 digital photos
• Plug & Play - easy to install
• Works just like a SanDisk 8-in-1 Card Reader when connected to your PC
• Compact Size, complete with Remote Control

Amazon.com Product Description
SanDisk's Photo Album (SPA) is a compact, sleek and easy-to-use device that enables you to display digital still pictures or video clips on your TV. Instead of crowding around your PC monitor, show off your latest digital images to friends and families using any TV set with an audio-video input. It's compatible with eight flash memory card formats as well as portable USB flash drives. You can use the SPA to play MP3 music files on your home audio system as well as add soundtracks to photo slide shows viewed on your TV.

The SPA supports eight flash memory card formats in four slots--CompactFlash Type I/II, Secure Digital (SD)/MultiMediaCard (MMC), Memory Stick/Memory Stick PRO, and SmartMedia/xD. The rear of the SPA has two USB ports--one that can connect to a PC (enabling you to use the SPA as an 8-in-1 card reader/writer) and another that can host a portable USB flash drive such as a SanDisk Cruzer Mini, Cruzer Micro, or Cruzer Titanium. There is also a slot for a second CompactFlash Card can be used as "archiving memory" for storing extended slide shows from images that are displayed from flash cards on the front side or from the USB flash drive, as well as store and replay video clips and MP3 music selections.

In addition to standard JPEG still images and MP3 files, the media player supports Motion JPEG and MPEG-1 for video. Playing MP3 tracks through television speakers or through a separate audio system is easy. Just load the SanDisk Photo Album with a flash card or USB flash drive that contains MP3 files and it will play them just like CDs on a CD player.

Customer Reviews

What they don't tell you in the instructions
I recieved the unit and hooked it up to a 27" TV. I then plugged in the compact flash card and turned the unit on. This habit came from experience with card readers and operating systems before WinXP that used to threaten you with all kind of awful things when you inserted or pulled a card out without doing it "properly". Having a card in a reader and turning the power on had always worked for me in the past.

The unit came up and displayed the SanDisk logo like it says in the instructions. However, the unit seemed to be locked up. I fiddled with it, checked cables, connections etc. Turned it off and on several times. Finally, I got frustrated and commented to my wife about how the unit wasn't working. The comments included several colorful adjectives that will not be used in this review. I then pulled the card out of the slot with the power still on and the unit displayed "insert a card".

I did what it said. The little green light blinked. It read the info on the card and started working as advertised.

If you read the instructions closely. Do exactly what it says in step six of the installation instructions. Then as it says - "you will see a message to insert a memory card".

Bottom line is, if you forget to take the memory card out when you turn the unit off, it will not work correctly when you power it back up with a card installed in a slot.

After I got past the power it up without a card in a slot exercise, the unit displayed JPG photos fine. It also played the sample MPG video of the gondola ride that you get with WinXP. It was a little jerky. Don't really know how it would work with digital video out of a video camera. The specs say MPEG-1 up to 8FPS.

There seems to be a slight delay after you push a remote key before the unit responds. The unit reacts more like a VCR than a computer to a remote keypress. Once I realized this, I slowed down my double click instinct. All of the functions worked fine as long as you push the button and wait for the unit to respond.

Pictures that are taken with the camera turned sideways (taller than wide) display smaller than pictures that are taken in normal orientation (wider than tall) The rotate and zoom functions will let you rotate, move around, and "blow up" the taller than wide view. The rotate picture funtion works OK but is a bit clumsy to use during a slide show.

The unit will display only JPG format pictures up to 16MEGS in size. The pictures I displayed were about 2.3MEG JPGs (file size). The picture size was about 18MEGS. The unit showed a crisper picture when the settings were changed to display "original resolution".

I bought the unit to show pictures directly on a large TV screen without any other hardware. If you don't have a TV with three input plugs (two for sound, one for video), you need to purchase a "modulator" to convert to coax cable output for older TVs.

All in all, I like the unit. It is cheaper than buying one of the "digital frames" even when you add the "modulator".

I plan on using the unit to display images on a TV for a relative in a nursing home. Using the compact stoarge media available today, it is possible to transport, store, and view of a lot more photos than you can carry in a suticase full of 3X5 photo prints. The pictures are bigger (better viewing for 80+ year old eyes) and everyone can look and comment on the pictures as you all view them together.

In my opinion, the only thing keeping the SanDisk Photo Album from a five star rating is the lack of a "modulator" built in to allow older TVs to connect without another "gizmo" that adds tranformers, cables, plugs, & clutter to the unit setup.

Affordable and Excellent after all!
The SanDisk Digital PhotoViewer (the actual model is more recent than the one pictured here) is far less expensive than the other digital photo viewers. At first, I couldn't get it to work, but then (like the other reviewer here) I went back, started over, and followed the instructions exactly.

In my case, that meant plugging it in to the tv...not to the vcr and not to the tv with the vcr still plugged in. Instead, I unplugged the vcr cables and put the PhotoViewer in their place. I imagine that might not be necessary for everyone, but with my particular tv, it solved the problem completely. AFter that...turned it on...inserted my XD card...and it worked perfectly. It's a great little viewer--lots of fun for slide shows (I haven't tried them with music yet)--and very inexpensive to boot! Definitely recommended.

Adequate; you get what you pay for, I suppose.
I purchased this Photo Viewer as a temporary solution for viewing digital photos. Long term, I intend to put something a bit more elaborate together involving a flat-panel iMac, but that's several months down the line, so I wanted to be able to look at my photos now.

Originally, I was hoping to find an affordable digital frame; nothing spectacular, just something for now. Those all turned out to be more money than I wanted to spend at this point. So, when I found the SanDisk, I thought I had it all worked out. Reviews had it as less than ideal, but again, this was a temporary solution for me.

When it arrived and I carved it out of the blister pack (can we please stop with the blister packs? I'll gladly pay an extra 10¢ for a freakin' box!) I was very anxious to get it running, as we had a mountain of photos from a trip to Africa that we had barely even peeked at. So, I grabbed a handful, threw 'em on an SD card and fired up the Photo Viewer.

Cannot display image.

Hmm. That's odd. This thing has one purpose: displaying JPGs. Sure it has a few other features, but that's all it's really for. So, I try a thumb drive instead. No luck.

Long story short, after much experimentation, I learned that it can't display progressive JPGs. Also, it gets really bogged down on JPGs saved for the web (with the extra info stripped out). Once I narrowed all of this down, it actually performed fairly well. The images "vibrate" a bit, kinda like a VCR on pause, but hey, for $35, I can see my photos on the TV screen.

So, it does what it claims. It doesn't do it well, but it does it for $35. It would have been nice to include a sentence in the instructions about file format issues.