Nixplay smart vs seed comparison in 2020

Nixplay has been serving America’s families for over 10 years with our high-quality Smart Photo Frames – the ideal gift for every family member. Share your favorite moments with your loved ones on a smart digital photo frame from Nixplay. How to choose the best digital photo frames? Our guide to Nixplay smart vs seed comparison chart will help you.

Nixplay Smart Frames vs Nixplay WiFi Seed

Nixplay Smart Photo Frames are our newest WiFi frames.

What makes them different (Nixplay smart vs seed) from the existing WiFi (Seed / Iris) frames is the Smart design and finish:

1. Newly-designed bezel
2. New finishes including metal and wood
3. The larger size of 15.6-inches
4. All Nixplay Smart Photo Frames are also wall-mountable, allowing for a smarter finish
5. All Nixplay Smart Photo Frames also have an improved cable stand, which now attaches at the centre of the frame rear for greater stability

From the perspective of using the Nixplay Mobile App; to add photos and videos to the frame, you still benefit from all features across both the Smart Photo Frames and Wi-Fi frames (Nixplay smart vs seed).

Said differently, improvements and new functionality are continually being added to our app, which means that you benefit from these irrespective of which frame you choose to buy.

Nixplay smart vs seed comparison

For your easy understanding, we have made this Nixplay smart vs seed comparison chart to find the key differences.

Difference Between NIX, Nixplay, and Nixplay Signage

NIX Digital Photo Frames are crafted with premium high-resolution displays that can show your favorite photos and videos in vivid color. NIX frames are not Wi-Fi compatible, but they support plug-and-play from a USB device or an SD/SDHC memory card.

Nixplay Smart Photo Frames are designed for the easy sharing of photos and videos memories securely and privately, especially between friends and families at a distance from each other. You can share photos and video from your phone directly to a Nixplay frame, wherever it is located in the world.

Nixplay Signage is built on the same principles as Nixplay, serving business owners who want to share insightful and engaging marketing content on custom signage displays from anywhere in the world. It’s an excellent vehicle for marketing messaging, videos, images, streamed content via apps, and other content. Marketing campaigns can be scheduled to appear on multiple displays across the globe via an intuitive, easy-to-use content management system.

Nixplay Smart photo frames comparison

Nixplay Smart Digital Picture Frame review

Nixplay has been serving America’s families for over 10 years. A great gift for new parents, grandparents, newlyweds, college kids or families separated by distance

Share images to your loved ones’ frames and invite others to share pictures to your frame; Send unique photos or playlists to separate frames and grow your private family sharing network

The Nixplay App for iOS and Android gives you full control over your frame; Connect to Google Photos to ensure your frame is always up to date; Dropbox, Facebook and Instagram also supported from website

1920×1080 FHD IPS display with 16:9 aspect ratio auto adjusts to portrait or landscape placement; Motion sensor turns the frame on/off automatically; Works with Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, just ask for the playlist you want

Get support when you need it – even during the Holidays! We have hundreds of thousands of happy customers, and we want to do everything we can to make you happy with your frame

Nix­play Seed 10.1 WiFi pho­to frame review

Design & Appear­ance

The Nix­play Seed is a well engi­neered pho­to frame. The 8-inch ver­sion comes in black, mul­ber­ry, blue and man­go, the 10, 10.1 and 13-inch ver­sions only in black. The frame col­or is fixed; the frame ele­ments are not inter­change­able.

Although the frame is made of plas­tic it has a pleas­ant touch & feel. It seems to have some sort of stain “resis­tant” coat­ing, so fin­ger prints do not leave a vis­i­ble trace. While Nixplay digital frames finishes including metal and wood (Nixplay smart vs seed comparison).

It is quite slim with a depth of 9 mm. Like an Apple iMac it gets a bit thick­er in the mid­dle but you only real­ly see the nar­row sides. The back is grooved and has a sub­tle checks pat­tern.

Instead of a stand, the Nix­play Seed has a rigid woven pow­er cord which acts as a stand that you can adjust in many ways in both por­trait and land­scape ori­en­ta­tion.

The dis­play

The Nix­play Seed comes in two dif­fer­ent aspect ratios. The 8 and 10-inch mod­els have an aspect ratio of 3:2, where­as the 10.1 and 13.3 mod­els have 16:10.

I have writ­ten before about the impor­tance of aspect ratio.

In a nut­shell, the more you devi­ate from the orig­i­nal for­mat in which the pho­tos were tak­en, the more the image will have to be cropped if you want to avoid show­ing black bars on the sides (“pil­lar­box­ing”).

A stan­dard DSLR cam­era has a 3:2 aspect ratio, most smart­phones 4:3. 16:9 is typ­i­cal­ly a video for­mat, and unfor­tu­nate­ly it has tak­en got­ten so pop­u­lar with dis­play man­u­fac­tur­ers that it has become chal­leng­ing to find non-16:9 dis­plays.

So it is refresh­ing to see that the Nix­play Seed still offers 3:2 although only up to 10 inch. 16:10 is also not too bad for DSLR pho­tos. So be care­ful when you pick your desired aspect ratio.

As a pho­tog­ra­ph­er I would always get a 3:2 pic­ture frame – as long as you can.

The dis­play has a mat­te coat­ing to reduce reflec­tion, and I would cer­ti­fy that they have done a good job here. The Nix­play Seed uses an IPS dis­play which pro­vides excel­lent col­ors across all view­ing angles.

The dis­play has a res­o­lu­tion of 1280 x 800 px which results on a dots-per-inch val­ue of almost 150 which makes images look very sharp.

The Seed is for place­ment on a sur­face only; there is no wall mount.

Hard­ware

It’s some­what strange to talk about a dig­i­tal frame as a com­put­er, but that’s what it is. Albeit a one-trick com­put­er.

The sys­tem is noise­less and does not have any mov­ing parts, except obvi­ous­ly for the adjustable wire stand.

It comes with b/g/n Wifi, that is the fast one. In your router, it will appear as some­thing like “android-1b9b­b43d4c9e6c2c”.

The Seed does not have any SD slots or USB con­nec­tors, but that’s what WiFi is for.

It does have two speak­ers for video play­back, but the qual­i­ty is that of a small speak­er in a pic­ture frame.

If you want large speak­ers, have a look at the Nix­play Seed Wave.

Pho­to Man­age­ment Approach

The Nix­play Seed is Cloud-based, which means that all images are stored on Nix­play servers first and then streamed to the pic­ture frame.

You can do this either via your smart­phone app (for iOS and Android) or through the brows­er on your PC or lap­top.

Both the Nix­play mobile and desk­top app are very easy to use. There is even a spe­cial tablet-sized app avail­able.

I tend to pre­fer the desk­top app because if you have a fold­er of images, you can upload them in one go. Maybe I am old-fash­ioned, but this works a lot faster for me than doing it on my phone.

Most peo­ple will prob­a­bly do the ini­tial image upload in the brows­er app and casu­al­ly add images via the smart­phone over time.

You can allow friends & fam­i­ly to add images to your playlist by send­ing them a link but will also get a per­son­al Nix­play email to which you can send images.

You can also link your Nix­play account to Google Pho­tos, Insta­gram, Drop­box, Face­book, and Flickr.

Videos are allowed up to a dura­tion of 15 sec­onds.

Over­all, the image man­age­ment imple­men­ta­tion of Nix­play is sim­ple, fast and leaves lit­tle to be desired.

Image view­ing options

Nix­play has done a very nice job with image tran­si­tions, often a weak point of pic­ture frames. There are eight dif­fer­ent ways of dis­play­ing your pho­tos includ­ing

• Fit to screen where the image is shown uncropped and the result­ing bars (if the iaspect ratio of the image is unlike the aspect ratio of the frame) have a col­or that is present in the image.
• Fill screen – pho­tos are stretched so that you won’t see any black bars.
• Pan – slight­ly moves the image
• Pan & zoom – Mov­ing and zoom­ing
• Tiles – show four pho­tos as the same time and rotate the images indi­vid­u­al­ly
• Snap­shot – every image has a small white frame around it and they are stacked like if you were look­ing through a num­ber of pho­tos.

You can also spec­i­fy play­back of only the lat­est 100, 200, 500 or 1000 images.

The tran­si­tion time can be set to any­thing between 5 sec­onds and one hour.

You can have a clock dis­played and even an image cap­tion that you entered when the pho­tos were added to a playlist.

With all these types of dis­play­ing your images, you can choose hard cuts (jump cut), cross­fades, cir­cles, wipe, slice, reveal, push, fold, and pix­e­late. In the begin­ning, it is prob­a­bly eas­i­est to set it to the ran­dom mode and then deter­mine your favorite tran­si­tion type.

You may have read about me favor­ing cross­fad­ing tran­si­tions because it reduces dis­tur­bance by sud­den bright­ness changes to a min­i­mum.

You can define indi­vid­ual playlists that you can pop­u­late man­u­al­ly. There is some smart playlist in the sense that you can choose only to dis­play the most recent images.

Gen­er­al frame con­trol & oper­a­tion

You can set up the frame in either por­trait or land­scape posi­tion, and the frame will auto­mat­i­cal­ly change ori­en­ta­tion much like you are used to on mobile devices these days.

The Nix­play Seed comes with a well designed remote con­trol (that looks and feels like the back of the frame) but you can equal­ly con­trol it with your mobile device or on your com­put­er.

I am not sure how “grand­ma com­pat­i­ble” the remote con­trol is. But since you can con­trol the frame via the inter­net, the kids could always help – pro­vid­ed the frame is plugged in and con­nect­ed to the wifi.

If you unplug the frame, it recon­nects auto­mat­i­cal­ly to the wifi net­work and resumes oper­a­tion.

But the ini­tial set­up requires a bit of patience although Nix­play makes it as easy as pos­si­ble. But this is prob­a­bly not a pic­ture frame that you can send to a non-tech­ni­­cal per­son and expect him or her to set it up.

But once it is set up, it requires no real main­te­nance. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, you can­not set up every­thing and ship the frame to be ready to go because the local WiFi can­not be pre-pro­­grammed.

Ener­gy man­age­ment

I mea­sured ener­gy con­sump­tion of 6 Watts, which is as expect­ed for a frame of this screen size.

The motion sen­sor can reduce this even more, but I am not a fan of hav­ing to walk in front of a frame to turn it on. But any­way, you can turn the sen­sor off if you don’t like it.

Besides, the pho­to frame can be timer con­trolled.

Cabling Options

Instead of hav­ing a thin white cable dan­gling out of the frame, the Nix­play design­ers have put some seri­ous thoughts into one of the most annoy­ing fea­tures of pic­ture frames, the cabling.

The black thick cable dou­bles as a ful­ly adjustable stand and there­by clev­er­ly hides the cable. This is much bet­ter solved than oth­er solu­tions that I have seen. Bra­vo, Nix­play!

Pric­ing and sub­scrip­tion ser­vices

When you buy the Nix­play Seed, you can use the Nix­play cloud ser­vice free of charge up to a capac­i­ty of 10 GB pic­tures. That cor­re­sponds to about 8,000 pic­tures and should be more than enough. If you need more, you can sub­scribe to Nix­play Plus, but I fail to see the need ever aris­ing.

Nixplay Seed comparison 2020

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