2008-05-26

Westinghouse DPH-0802 Digital Picture Frame

I want to warn everyone away from Westinghouse products.

Last August I got a DPF-0802 digital picture frame and I never got it working properly. A few minutes after I would start it up, lines and other artifacts would start appearing on the screen. After a while it would be fractal nonsense. An email complaint to Westinghouse earned me the response that you can't upload JPEGs with meta data in them. Keep in mind, any digital camera you use to take a picture inserts meta data into the JPEG file. So you have to open each and every picture in Microsoft Paint and re-save it strip out the meta data. A real pain in the ass.

Well I tried this and it didn't help anything. I got lazy and let time pass. Eventually I complained again. Apparently you can't also save the pictures in the root directory of the frame itself. That makes no sense. After all, when you plug it into your computer via USB cable you're automatically at the root directory.

So obvious Westinghouse can't write software worth crap. Their JPEG library is atrocious and they can't handle files not being in a certain directory. Someone screwed up somewhere along the way.

Fast forward another few months and the frame won't power up at all. The thing is a brick. I finally call up Westinghouse and want to get it fixed or replaced. Woops. My six month warranty expired so they won't do jack for me. Six months? What is this Chinese crap? The kicker is that I could send it to an authorized repair outlet... but there are none in my entire state! Great job, Westinghouse! You truly excel in the field of customer support!

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