Is the Skylight 10-inch Wi-Fi digital picture frame worth buying?
The Skylight 10-inch Wi-Fi digital picture frame is a tricky one. On paper, it’s one of the most competitive premium frames on the market. It seems to be placed at an excellent price point. They have attractive displays and aesthetic designs. You have access to a mobile app, photo-mail, video playback, cloud storage, online access, and more. These are features found only among the best digital frames like Pix-Star and Dragon Touch.
The issue is that Skylight locks almost all of these features behind a subscription paywall. The Skylight Plus subscription is an annual fee charged to unlock features like video playback, cloud storage, and the use of the mobile app. In practice, the only free-to-use feature is emailing photos to your frame.
Now, there are a couple of important points worth noting. Once the Skylight frame’s internal storage runs out, you will have no choice but to pay for the subscription. Additionally, Skylight frames don’t support USB/SD cards. Unlike Pix-Star’s Wi-Fi digital picture frames, you can’t play slideshows from a USB/SD card, or transfer photos from them. Since you don’t get online access with the “basic” plan, you have to delete photos one by one on the frame. If you have several thousand photos on your frame, this can be a massive time sink.
Another key issue is that these frames don’t work offline. If you aren’t connected to Wi-Fi, you’ll oftentimes be met by a blank screen saying “Could not connect to Wi-Fi” when trying to display photos. almost all other premium frames (aside from the Aura frame) offer great offline functionality – so it’s a major knock to Skylight’s frames.
Without access to the mobile app or web interface, there isn’t much the Skylight frame offers to families and elderly users. You can only send pictures by email. For comparison, Pix-Star’s frames let you send up to 250 photos to several Pix-Star frames at the same time – which isn’t possible with Skylight’s email feature.
Without purchasing the Skylight Plus subscription fee, you’re left with a severely limited frame. It won’t cater to the modern home & family and will feel outdated for 2022 and beyond. Other competing frames like the Pix-Star offer the same features – and offer them better in many cases – without charging extra fees. When you compare their total cost (including the subscription for the frame’s lifespan), Skylight’s frames quickly become some of the most expensive on the market.
We recommend buying a non-subscription-based digital picture frame like the Pix-Star or Dragon Touch frame. Pix-Star’s frames take it a step further by offering web albums (sync from social media) and remote configuration (from anywhere in the world) in addition to all of the same features Skylight offers. It’s not worth buying the Skylight 10-inch digital picture frame due to their reduced feature set, poor aspect ratio, and too many functions being locked behind the Skylight Plus subscription paywall.
Does the Skylight 10-inch Wi-Fi digital picture frame charge monthly fees?
The Skylight 10-inch Wi-Fi digital picture frame charges a subscription fee called “Skylight Plus”. This subscription package is required if you want to use Skylight’s mobile app, online access, cloud storage, and video playback.
It’s worth noting that if you plan on keeping these frames for longer than a couple of months, the subscription is essential. Once the 8GB internal fills up, you will have to buy cloud storage to expand space. Even then, photos will need to be synced to the frame’s internal storage before they can be viewed.
Despite having internal storage, Skylight digital picture frames don’t work offline. When you try to display photos offline, you’ll often be met with a blank screen and a connection error message.
Other popular digital picture frames like the Nixplay frame charge a monthly fee. The issue with subscription-based frames is that their long-term total cost makes them some of the most expensive on the market. For comparison, Pix-Star’s frames offer all of the same – and better – features as the Skylight. Pix-Star’s sales price is slightly lower than Skylight’s, yet Pix-Star doesn’t charge any extra subscription fees.
You’re going to get much better value for money from a non-subscription digital picture frame. We suggest looking at other top digital frames like the Pix-Star frame, Dragon Touch frames, Aura frames, etc. Pix-Star is arguably the best value for money out of all of these frames, but more on that in the section below!
How does the Skylight 10-inch Wi-Fi digital picture frame compare with the Pix-Star?
The Skylight Wi-Fi 10-inch digital picture frame and Pix-Star’s 10-inch Wi-Fi digital frames are two of the most popular on the market. While they may seem very similar at first glance, Pix-Star’s frames take a massive lead when you look at their total costs, feature set, versatility, and functions for the modern home & family.
Pix-Star’s frames offer free-for-life cloud storage; Skylight locks with behind their subscription paywall. Pix-Star offers both a mobile app and a web interface; Skylight locks this behind a paywall. Pix-Star offers video & audio support, you can include videos in slideshows, connect to external speakers, etc. Skylight locks this behind a paywall. This leads us to Skylight’s biggest issue – it’s a subscription-based digital picture frame.
Where Pix-Star offers a robust and free feature set, Skylight charges monthly fees. This wouldn’t be an issue if Skylight Plus gave you unique and alluring features – but it doesn’t. You pay to unlock features that Pix-Star offers more comprehensively and without charging a cent extra.
Pix-Star then goes on to offer other unique features like web albums and remote configuration support. Pix-Star’s web album support lets you import photos albums from external sources directly to your frame’s internal storage. You can import photos from Facebook, Instagram, Google Drive & Photos, Dropbox, Flickr, and even from your computer. A dozen sources are supported and they’re available offline. You can even start slideshows from synced web albums on any linked Pix-Star frame – from anywhere in the world.
Pix-Star’s frames have a better 4:3 aspect ratio, compared to Skylight’s 16:9 display. Most of our smartphones capture photos in 4:3 and most cameras in 3:2. Pix-Star’s 4:3 aspect ratio is far better suited to displaying these photos without having to edit, crop, stretch or surround them with black boxes.
Pix-Star offers better slideshows with more controls & customizations. You can adjust the slideshow’s play order and frequency, start custom slideshows from specific files & folders, start slideshows remotely via the web interface, and even create unique collages.
Subscription-based digital frames like Skylight and Nixplay are going to struggle to find their place on the market. More and more people are tired of endless subscription services eating away at their disposable income. We recommend avoiding subscription-based digital picture frames like Skylight and Nixplay for the reasons above.
All in all, the Pix-Star 10-inch frame is a much better value-for-money digital frame than the Skylight 10-inch Wi-Fi digital frame. Pix-Star offers more features, no monthly fees, great video & audio support, and one of the best viewing experiences on the market.
How to send photos to the Skylight 10-inch Wi-Fi digital picture frame?
The only way to send photos to the Skylight 10-inch Wi-Fi digital picture frame is by email. You can send from any device, as long as you have your frame’s unique email address. Most email clients (e.g., Gmail, Exchange, etc.) have a 10MB file size limit on outgoing emails. Make sure that you send less than 10MB of photos to the Skylight frame – or they’ll likely bounce or partially load.
This email function is offered by almost every premium digital picture frame on the market – and by some mid-range frames too. It’s not the most efficient way to send photos due to its inherent limitations. For comparison, Pix-Star’s mobile app (Pix-Star Snap) lets you send up to 250 photos to several Pix-Star frames at the same time – no matter where you are in the world.
To unlock Skylight’s mobile app, you need to pay for the annual Skylight Plus subscription package. Unfortunately, you can only add two email addresses to Skylight’s app. If you have more than 2 Skylight frames (which is common for most families), you can’t send to all of them at the same time. By contrast, Pix-Star lets you manage and control up to 25 Pix-Star frames from a single user account – making them much better for families than Skylight’s frames.
A key point worth noting is that Skylight’s frames don’t support USB/SD cards. This means that you can’t play slideshows off a connected USB/SD card like you can with Pix-Star. With Pix-Star’s frames, there are no limits on the maximum capacity of supported USB/SD cards, giving you access to virtually unlimited storage space. This is made even better by Pix-Star’s plug & play feature. None of these features are available on Skylight’s frames.
Can the Skylight 10-inch Wi-Fi digital picture frame play video and audio?
The Skylight 10-inch Wi-Fi digital picture frame locks video and audio playback behind their Skylight Plus subscription paywall. Without paying for this annual subscription package, there’s no way to load videos to the frame or view them.
Even if you purchase the Skylight Plus subscription package, you can’t play videos longer than 60-seconds or larger than 25MB. There is also a common issue whereby the audio starts playing before the video plays when they’re included in slideshows. There’s no apparent fix as of yet.
For reference, Pix-Star’s 10-inch Wi-Fi digital picture frame lets you play 2-minute video clips, include them in slideshows, and more. You can send videos to your Pix-Star frames via the mobile app or from an inserted USB/SD card.
