Why I buy this one ?
- Receives and displays a digital photo slide show without a computer
- Receiver receives 50% more pictures each night than the previous model--up to 30 at a time
- An ideal gift for even the most non-technical parents, grandparents or friends
- Order prints of favorite photos through the mail simply by pressing “Order Print” button on Receiver
- Requires subscription to Ceiva Network--low monthly and yearly rates available

What our customer's say!

"Be careful when buying Ceiva/service plan!!!", I purchased a Ceiva when they first came out and added Lifetime service. 7 years later I learn that my "lifetime" service is set to expire! Lifetime is defined as the life of the physical frame or 7 years! Seriously? Only 7 years!

In the meantime, TiVo has let me upgrade my first gen TiVo with Lifetime service TWICE and retain my lifetime status. That's what I call LIFETIME.

They're good frames, but that is some lousy customer relations. Needless to say, I refused the monthly service and plan to purchase another frame without a service fee.

"Ceiva can be shared with your desktop!", Grandma has a Ceiva frame, but I have a laptop and you can download a program to send ceiva pictures to your laptop or computer as wallpaper. You can also send pictures from your computer to the ceiva frame. You can get the software at www.pictureshare.net It makes ceiva so much cooler for us. Very easy to use, beautiful wallpaper changer. The only one that talks to Ceiva frames.

"How to Thrill a Mom", We got one of these for my Mother-in-law for Christmas, because she 1)lives in another state in a retirment community and 2)gets flustered just trying to use the TV remote, so email and web sites are out of the question for sending new pictures to her. Of course there's still good old snail-mail, but we thought she'd get a kick out of the instantaneous gratification of getting pictures the day we take them.

Well! It turned out to give her a bigger kick than we expected. Every time we send a new batch of pictures she calls us all excited about them and keeps asking, "But how on earth do you do it?" The thing is: she doesn't actually need to know! We are able to take care of everything from our end, from uploading pictures to even setting how fast the slide-show goes and what time the receiver turns off at night. She doesn't have to do a thing, and that's a good thing because she really is very intimidated by technology.

On the advice of another review I read here, we set up the receiver and the online account from our own home when we first got the Ceiva, and made sure everything was working properly before we drove to her home and gave it to her. All we had to do was plug it in for her. I did show her how to use the "next" and "previous" buttons but she doesn't even really need to know that - she would have been perfectly content if I'd never even showed her how to open the button bar at all. She doesn't have to do a thing, and that was what we were aiming for.

The coolest thing is that I think, while she likes the gift and the pictures very much, the best part for her is the way all her friends and neighbors gush over how neat it is and how they want one, too.

One bit of advice: I would recommend that before you plug your investment into the wall, buy a surge protector - the kind that you plug both electrical and phone lines in to - and be sure to use that. I am guessing that power surges are behind some of the comments I've seen here from people who say their unit "just stopped working" a few months after getting it. After having our futzy phone lines blow out countless answering machines, cordless phones, and laptop modems, I never plug any electronic device into a phone line anymore without a surge protector. You can get a very good one that plugs directly into the wall (no extra cords) for under $20, and it's well worth it.

The only other thing I'd recommend for future versions of the Ceiva is Bigger Buttons. The buttons themselves are very sleek and tiny, but they and the text labeling them are 'way too small for most Seniors to use, and it seems to me that the folks who get the most benefit from the Ceiva are in fact Seniors.

Another thing: what is all this whinging on and on about the paltry monthly online fee that is charged for maintaining your photos on the Ceiva web site to upload to the receiver? I think it's a pitance and well worth the joy it gives to Mom. We spend much more than that on our regular online access account, not to mention on long-distance calls to her - in the grand scheme of things I think it's a perfectly reasonable fee for the service.


"CEIVA SUCKS!", I was very excited about buying a CEIVA for my technology-phobic, West Coast parents, who are in their 80s. I thought they would love seeing pictures of the grandkids, and they did... the one time it worked. After MANY attempts to fix it, including over a dozen phone calls to CEIVA to try to get the problem resolved, CEIVA acknowledged defeat and told us to return the unit to them. (I might add in that 1) calls to customer service take FOREVER as they will keep you on hold for a a LOOOOONG time before you actually get to talk to anyone; 2) they weren't particularly nice during the calls, and intimated to my parents that perhaps they weren't smart enough to figure out how the thing worked).

Well, my parents returned the unit to CEIVA as instructed, after pointing out to the company that we hadn't bought it directly from them. CEIVA said this was ok -- they even provided a return authorization number. My parents promptly mailed it off. Thank goodness I told them as a precaution to send it with delivery tracking and insurance. CEIVA never acknowledged having received it; when I contacted them 6 weeks later to say that I hadn't seen a refund on my credit card, they couldn't find the receiver; then, when they finally did find it, they refused to refund our money, stating that their only remedy was to send a new receiver. Well, at this point, as you can imagine, my parents didn't want the friggin' thing. So I am now stuck with a $150 receiver and nobody to use it. CEIVA, and CEIVA customer service, is horrible. I wouldn't recommend their products to ANYONE.

"Broke after a year", It's a great idea, but the device broke after just one year. Also, Ceiva is kind of scummy - they won't refund your yearly subscription fee if you cancel after 180 days - sounds illegal, but who's going to fight over $40.

Read this reviews before You buy...

"Great gift for loved ones without internet access", This product has a very specific role. It makes the perfect gift for someone who is not very computer saavy. If the person has easy email and internet access, it makes more sense (and is much cheaper) to send pictures to them through other means.

My husband and I purchased this frame for his mom. We had previously tried to give her a computer but it collected dust. Since she loves pictures of the grandkids and we live several hours away, we thought this would be a good gift.

The first step--plugging it in--was simple. The frame needs to have a location with easy access to both phone and electricity, or you'll have cords all over the place. Once attached, it starts displaying the Ceiva company information, including the customer service phone number.

Getting the frame to properly connect and load pictures was more involved. First, it needs to be registered at the Ceiva site (that had to happen "off-site" since my mother-in-law doesn't have a computer). The website is where you load the pictures and set the guidelines for the frame (what times to turn it on and off and what number for the frame to call to load new pictures, etc) Then you need to purchase a subscription which costs almost as much as the frame on a yearly basis. Once that's done, it's supposed to be as easy as someone pushing a button (the big one on the base of the frame) and the pictures would load.

Unfortunately, it didn't work at first. Our frame took a few calls to customer service (luckily a circulating pre-loaded picture on the frame) and emails from us to correct the problem. Telephone customer service was courteous and gracious to my mother-in-law. Email customer service was slow and sometimes didn't respond directly, though they did take care of a separate problem eventually.

From my mother-in-law's perspective, the solution was just pushing that big button multiple times, intermittently over the course of the day, until it finally connected. I'm not sure it was the same solution from Ceiva's point of view.

Once that was resolved, EVERYTHING has worked like a dream. The frame revolves 30 different pictures. On the website, I keep everything in an album so I know which ones she's seen. My brother-in-law several states away can upload pictures onto her frame as well. We can also send captions with the pictures or special greetings on Mother's Day etc. She is absolutely thrilled, and I will probably be buying one for my grandmother (who is in a board and care home) this year.

PROS: Fabulous gift for the computer-less, can be accessed (on invitation/with password) by other loved ones to load their photos, easy to plug in, seamless operation once working

CONS: Expensive cost of subscription (factor it into your gift giving), took some time and customer service input to get it connected, unable to edit/crop photos on website (do it before), cost of ordering prints of photographs for the receiver (we use a different company)

"Baffled by the bad reviews", I gave my parents a Ceiva receiver over a year and a half ago. I haven't had one problem. And... Ceiva has just developed software that it distributes (for free) to make downloading pictures a breeze. I'm going to buy another one... I'd buy two or three more if I could, so that all of my family could share pictures. The price has been reasonable. It's a great gift.

"Didn't buy, here's why", After having considered the Ceiva frame/service given a couple months research and maybe 5-6 hours total (inc talking with a current user), these are the pros and cons in my opinion:

PRO
- One person I know who has one and got a couple for family members likes it and does not regret the purchase
- Picture/LCD quality appears to be sufficient, bordering on good.
- Awesome idea for kids to get pics of children's and grandchildren's lives
- Low maintenance for recipient, given automated downloading of new pictures each night.

CONS
- The one consistent theme in all reviews here and on other sites is that Cust service is abysmal. I looked everywhere and could not find a phone number for cust service, despite a couple user comments about being "on hold" for 20 minutes. This scares me a great deal--not b/c I'm not technical--but b/c there appear to be a number of service and hardware complaints, and obviously resolution requires cust service. Exchanges are difficult to handle with 48hr email turnaround times, no doubt involving multiple messages back and forth.
- The subscription fee is quite high, in my opinion
- It seems the moment you cancel the subscription, whatever pictures are in the device are there forever, as there is NO OPTION to load pics other than through the subscription service.
- It seems a number of people have had technical hardware failures with the Ceiva I & II. The best warrantee I could find from all the Ceiva retailers is 60 days, otherwise you have to pay the extended warrantee of $20 for a full year of warrantee coverage. I think this is a little shotty, and makes me very uneasy given the reviews on this site.
- You have to get a subscription to the service to use the frame. There are cancellation fees for the service. So, if you buy the frame, don't like it or have problems, it seems 1) you will have difficulty reaching cust service, 2) have only 30-60 days to figure this out, hoping a problem does not occur after that period, 3) have to then cancel the subscription, which is a $10 fee within 30 days, or, after 30 days, it's $10 plus 50% of your subscription fee, which would be a total of about $60-70 if you bought a 1-year subscription (minimum is 3 months).

Summary: I really like the idea, and talked all siblings into buying for our parents, but I can't in good conscience buy this knowing all of the cons above. I truly feel that there is a good possibility of trouble, which sounds extremely difficult to resolve at the least, and expensive at worst.

-Brian U

"Great Unit", I was just down visiting an Aunt and Uncle (in their late 70's) and they LOVED it. They aren't real technical but they do use computers to get emails and stuff. They showed me how it all worked. It was real simple to send pictures if you know how to attach pictures to emails, it works very similarly. As far as receiving the photos you don't need to know anything. Someone that didn't know anything could just leave it set up on an end table. The unit does all the work and you would, without doing anything, see the new photos that were sent to you. They wanted to show me how it worked so we went in the other room, and went on the computer and to the Cieva website. After following the directions we hit the send button. We went in the other room and in a few minutes the pictures were being shown on the viewer. There might be other settings but they had it set to scroll through the pictures similarly to a screen saver. The quality of the pictures were very good. I asked them how much this cost and they had no idea, they received it as a gift. I really thought this was something very costly. I was really suprised when I got home and looked it up and found that it could be bought for the $99 dollars after rebate. There is a monthly charge for just the unit itself not to the people sending the photos. That ran about $7.50-$10 a month depending on how you plan on paying. I would definately recomend this for any person who knows nothing about computers and who may not live close enough to be able to see photos of the family easily.

"Terrific gift, especially for non-tech grandparents", We gave this as a gift to my 82 year old grandmother two years ago, and it's still a hit. She checks the frame for new pictures every morning when she's making her coffee; she's even gotten mad at us a couple of times for replacing pictures that we didn't know were her favorites. It's best to set it up BEFORE you send it to them so that all the recipient has to do is plug in a phone cord and let it run. Grandma's never had a problem with her unit, and we wish we could find another gift that would be so popular.