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Feature: Showing Your Digital Pics on Television

How do you show off your digital pictures? There's e-mail attachments, Photo CDs, postings on the Web ... all those are good. But based what I get in the Digital Focus mailbag, it seems that many of you really want to display your creations on your TV screens. There are obvious advantages to this: The living room is the social center of your house, for instance. Instead of packing guests around your computer desk, why not sit them down on the couch? And unless you got your computer from the bridge of an Imperial Star Destroyer, your TV is probably the biggest screen around, making it ideal for showing folks a digital slide show.

Making the Connection

The good news is that connecting most digital cameras to a television is not rocket science. In fact, the vast majority of digital cameras--everything from $200 budget models to $2000 digital SLRs--come with their own video-out cable. Just connect your camera to a composite video input on your TV or VCR, and you're in business. Indeed, many cameras even have a built-in slide show control, so you can tell the camera to display all the images on the memory card in sequence. Nothing could be easier. For details, just check your digital camera's user guide.

That said, there are other ways to show your pictures on a television. Connecting your camera is a bit clumsy, after all; maybe you'd like a more elegant solution. Plus, you might want to show your pictures at someone else's house without sending them your camera. There are a number of gadgets that get the job done.

Suppose your folks live many miles away, and you want to send them your pictures in a way that's easy to show on a TV. Give them Microsoft's TV Photo Viewer, a floppy drive that connects to the TV. Then send your pictures on a floppy disk and your folks can watch your images, perfectly formatted for TV (Microsoft includes a program for creating a slide show). Unfortunately, the TV Photo Viewer was officially discontinued, and it's a unique product. However, I continue to see it in computer stores for as little as $20. It's a steal at that price.

If you want a more versatile photo viewer for your own television, you might want to get a gadget like the Delkin eFilm Picturevision. This 6-in-1 device reads CompactFlash types I and II media and IBM Microdrives in one slot and SmartMedia, Memory Stick, MultiMediaCard, and Secure Digital media in another. The unit sits conveniently atop your television. Insert your digital camera's memory card, and Picturevision runs a slide show of your images, complete with video transitions. It even comes with a remote control so you can operate it from the couch. At press time, I found it on the PCWorld.com Product Finder for about $60.

The DVD Alternative

If you have a DVD burner in your PC, you can make DVD slide shows. One of my favorite applications for just this purpose is Sonic's MyDVD. I found MyDVD for about $65 on our Product Finder. This program lets you create a sophisticated slide show of still images with a music soundtrack and copy the whole thing to disc for playback in almost any DVD player.

Finally, I've noticed that there are DVD players showing up in stores with digital image savvy. Sampo sells the DVE-631CF, a $150 DVD player with a CompactFlash card built right in. Insert the card, and it automatically displays the images on your PC.