My mother just got one of these for Christmas. I'm not thrilled with the frame, but it's not bad. For those of you who didn't get a book or anything, here's how I set it up: 1. my digital camera uses an SD card so I took a blank one that I had laying around, stuck it in my printer (which has the SD slot, my PC doesn't). Then I took pics that I had my computer and just "copied" them to the card which was labeled as in the "F" drive on my computer. Your setup or drive may differ. Took about 2 minutes to copy about 50 pics. 2. Then I took the SD card out of the printer and put it in photo frame. That's the simple part! 3. Plug in the photo frame and program it using the remote; it's much easier than trying to program it using the buttons in the back (or on top). 4. Turn frame on. You should get a blue screen with 5 icons. (Photo, setup, calendar, clock and auto-power) 5. Use your arrow keys on the remote to move to each icon. I went to "Setup" first. That's where you'll find where to set the time between each picture as it rotates, transition effects, brightness, contrast, etc. Some buttons I didn't touch. Had no idea what they were for. I just left them alone LOL. It takes some getting used to the arrow keys and moving around but you'll get used to it. 6. Then I set the clock and calendar. WARNING: When you unplug the frame for any reason (to move it, etc), you may lose some of these settings. I lost them on the first unplug I did but not on the second. Since the clock and calendar aren't important to my mom, I didn't bother resetting them.) 7. Auto power is if you want to have the frame turn on automatically during a certain time of day and the turn off. So if you were using it at the office, you could set it for 8 am. and off at 5 pm, etc. WARNING: Again, these settings are lost if you lose power or unplug it. I find it just as easy to hit the on and off button rather than keep setting it again and again. NOTE: Personally, I'd shut the frame off if I were gone for long periods of time; I noticed the screen does get warm. While I don't think it's a fire hazard or anything, I'm worried that leaving it on 24/7 may just wear the screen out. It doesn't seem that high-quality to begin with so... 8. Photo: This is basically the button you hit to initially load the pics.. Even though they are already on the SD card, when I first turned the frame on, it "uploaded" them. I believe this is so it keeps them in queue and it loads faster from that point forward. This is also the button to just get the photos rolling. A couple of thoughts: - landscape-oriented photos fill up the screen nicely. portrait-oriented not so much. - the screen quality isn't great. Even when I played with the brightness and contrast settings, it still wasn't that terrific. - My mother's frame does have a few pixels missing on the screen. Doesn't really effect...

I have never liked pulling the card in and out compared to hooking my camera up USB, but now am doing such as I was having trouble DL'ing my camera software into my new XP computer. I have had that happen to me too to where I bought a new card etc. After use in my computer, when I turned my camera on after inserting the card, it would show No pictures or something to where I could not shoot until I fiddled around with it. So far, I am having luck as I slowly put it in and out, holding my breath hoping. I also found trouble occurred when thinking I had to use that Safely Remove Hardware from the taskbar which I don't do now. Sorry I can't help you but maybe the Photography forum may have run into that same incident if not solved here? Here is a link that might be useful: Photo forum

First of all the two machines take different formats. You might want to consider purchasing Embird that will convert the two formats so that you can use the same design with each machine sans the Disney designs that are propietary to Brother and can't be used on any other machine. You are correct that you will need a reader writer box for the Brother machine because your machines are different formats. The PED basic sounds like a good plan (available on line at Walmart for around $139.). I have two different brand machines and also found that the hoops are not interchangeable either. The only things that may be interchageable are feet and needles. The bobbins may be different so you really have to watch which bobbin you have and don't get them mixed up. I would thoroughly read the Brother manual before purchasing anything further...they are pretty good about documetation and educating if you practice the manual page by painful page.

For an 8mp camera, I finally got a 2gb card and shoot RAW, you don't need quite as large a card for JPG. Still, at events, I sometimes do shoot in JPG and was filling a 1gb card in 1/2 hour, the 2gb card filled up in about an hour doing some street shots and a parade in RAW. It's best to set the camera to the finest quality possible unless they are shots where you need a whole lot but the quality isn't critical. You can't ever get lost quality back on your important shots. Then there are the bigger cards. The reason I don't want to get into larger sizes is that if the card gets corrupted, you lose more photos, plus they are a lot more expensive. I have had good luck with my Kingston cards which were cheap and slower, now I have one Sandisk Ultra II, both seem to be pretty reliable. There was trouble with some brands. Those things are so tiny, it would be so easy to lose the extra ones. I need a better plan to try to avoid that. Be sure to order the right card for the cam. They either take CompactFlash or SD (or proprietary memory sticks), and it would be easy to make a mistake on that.