The family of electronic devices manufactured by Pandigital includes digital photo frames, eBook readers and Android media tablets. If you own one of their products or are considering purchasing one, familiarizing yourself with the file formats supported by each respective device might turn using them from an exercise in frustration into a smooth and pleasant experience.
Digital Photo Frames
The digital photo frames produced by Pandigital support only the images in the JPEG format. The images must be downloaded from a digital camera and their resolution must not exceed 16 MegaPixels; images created or modified by graphic editing software, such as Adobe Photoshop, or downloaded from the Internet might not be recognized by the frames. Certain digital photo frame models also allow viewing video files, as well as listening to music. The only video file format currently supported by the Pandigital photo frames is AVI, and the only music file format is MP3. In addition, for your music file to be playable it must not come from any licensed digital retailer.
E-book Readers
The Pandigital Novel Multimedia eReaders allow the user to read e-books, as well as view images, watch videos and listen to music. The only e-book file formats supported are EPUB and PDF. Image types supported are BMP, PNG, JPEG and non-animated GIF. Video files must be in the MPEG4 format, specifically MP4 and AVC. Audio files supported vary between Novel models: the Personal eReader allows only the MP3 format, the Color Multimedia eReader supports the MP3, WAV and AAC formats, and the newer version, based on the Android architecture, supports OGG files, as well.
Android Tablets
As the time of publishing, the most recent additions to the family of Pandigital products are dedicated Android Media Tablets -- codenamed Planet, Star, Nova and Supernova. The file types supported vary between each model. The Nova and Supernova support e-books in the EPUB and PDF formats, while the Planet and Star do not. All four tablets support the MP3, WAV and AAC audio formats. None of them supports OGG. All four models support BMP, PNG, JPEG and non-animated GIF images. The Planet model supports only MPEG4 video files, while the remaining three models also support FLV, or Flash Video format. Lastly, and exclusively to this line of products, all tablets except for the Star also support the simple text format TXT, the Microsoft Word documents DOC and DOCX, the Microsoft Excel spreadsheets XLS and XLSX, and the Microsoft PowerPoint presentations PPT and PPTX.
Considerations
Pandigital products are quite restrictive when it comes to the file formats supported. If you already own a library of images, video files or e-books and are planning to buy a Pandigital device to view them on, make sure their format is supported first. For example, certain digital cameras store their photos in a format other than JPEG, since converting them to JPEG requires a graphics editing program, you may not be able to view them on a Pandigital photo frame. If you already own e-books purchased on other devices, they may be in a format unsupported by the Pandigital Novel eReader -- if that is the case, check to see whether they can be converted to EPUB or PDF.
Tags: digital photo, file formats, file formats supported, formats supported, video files, also support