Learn Digital Photography .. Digital Photos On Tv!
Does the ability to display your treasured digital photo albums on you own TV sound much better than you computer? Sure it does!
It certainly makes sense to do this if you're showing off your pictures to many friends or family members. You wouldn't want your guests to crowd around that crummy computer screen would you?
Well, there are many ways to display photos on TV. Let's step through the various options in this article.
Using your digital camera itself is the most obvious method of displaying digital photos on TV. Most, if not all digital cameras come with a video-out cable. Just connect one end of the cable to camera's video-out plug and the other end into the video-in of the TV. That's it! Play back the photos on the camera and they will display on the TVits that simple.
The shortcoming with this method is that you can only show the photos on the memory card within the camera. If you only have a 32MB memory card, then you will have a limited number of photos.
Another method is to use a photo viewing device. The SanDisk Digital Photo Viewer is one such device. This neat little gadget sits on top of your TV set and it accepts popular memory cards like CompactFlash, MultiMedia, Secure Digital, SmartMedia and MemoryStick as input. There is a video-out port to connect the device to the TV. Compare it to using a digital version of a 35mm slide projector, so to speak.
There are also some DVD players coming out in the market which accept memory cards as input. One of these is the Sampo DVE-631CF. It's a decently priced DVD player which also lets you play back MP3s and JPEGs from both CD-R/RW and CompactFlash Type I cards.
However, whichever of the above options you choose, you're still limited by the amount of memory available on your memory card. Hence, if you have a small capacity memory card, you probably can't show to many pictures at one go.
The best approach of all, in my opinion, is to convert your digital photos to DVD format. The DVD you create can then be played back in any DVD player to display all your pictures as a slideshow. The chief advantage of this approach over the others is that you can store many, many photos on a 4GB DVD-R. It's also pretty convenient to send a DVD of pictures (instead of a memory card) to your friends or family members who live faraway.
All you need is a DVD burner and some special software. The best software I've found for doing this is Ulead CD and DVD PictureShow.
With its easy-to-use tutorials, this software allows you to convert all your digital photos to DVD in a few easy steps. What's more, you can add special effects to your photo slideshow, including transitions, music and DVD menus. There's a full set of tutorials at the Ulead website to guide you.
The software burns them into a DVD-R for you once you've converted them to DVD format. Then simply pop the DVD into any DVD player and play back your picture slideshow.
This article has shown you three options for displaying photos on your TV set. Displaying photos on the TV certainly makes sense when you have many guests wanting to view your photos. Whichever option you choose is up to you, but I feel that the best approach, as mentioned above, is to convert your photos to DVD format. Good luck and happy sharing!
