Photos on TV

As I have said in a previous post I am familiar with camcorder/ video processes but have only recently ventured seriously into digital photography.

I have copied some photos to CDs one as straight jpegs and the other as a VCD, both using Paint-shop photo album that came free with the PC.

Playing either as a slide show on the PC is excellent. However if I play either in my DVD player on TV (28" 4:3 CRT, RGB scart connection) I get two problems:-

1) Portraits are displayed at reduced size top and bottom. (i.e. the vertical occupies only around 350 lines of the 576 display)

2) The picture quality is nowhere as good as if I display the photos direct from the camera via AV connection. They are not as sharp and there is a lot of flicker in light areas.

Why is this?

I hope to buy a 37-40" LCD or possibly plasma soon - will this improve either aspect.

[salubrious_k]

A good excuse to buy a new games console? Both the PS3 and 360 have excellent slideshow functionality

(c;

Originally Posted by salubrious_k

A good excuse to buy a new games console? Both the PS3 and 360 have excellent slideshow functionality

(c;

Regret I am not a gamer so a games console would be a complete waste of money. Do you imply that it is the DVD player that is causing my problem?

[salubrious_k]

I'd say that point 1 definitely sounds like the player, I'm not sure about point 2, although it's very likely if they display fine from the camera and you're using similar quality cables.

[wibble]

The problem is not with any of your kit but that you are trying to display a hi-res photo on a screen thats possibly 3-4 times lower resolution than your PC's. All thats happening is the that the player +/or tv are having to "down-grade" the image to fit within a Tv's screen res.

[Tobers]

Possibly the Apple iTV might be the thing you are looking for.

It syncs music, photos and video with your PC wirelessly, and provides a slick user interface on your TV for you to view in various ways. Usual small white box that looks quite nice. £199.

Originally Posted by wibble

The problem is not with any of your kit but that you are trying to display a hi-res photo on a screen thats possibly 3-4 times lower resolution than your PC's. All thats happening is the that the player +/or tv are having to "down-grade" the image to fit within a Tv's screen res.

Wilst I see your point, it still does not explain why is it that if the camera is connected directly to the same TV using the AV cables supplied, then the same photos (on the original SD card) are displayed with much better picture quality and with portraits at full height?

Bump

Anyone else got any ideas on this one?

Thanks

[senu]

What I think is that the TV Scales down the highly detailed image to its own resolution when connected to the Camera
With the DVD, the image has been downscaled to 0.2Mp to show the whole of it . This downscaling is because the image needs to met the PAL standard of 720x 576: The DVD player is not blameless though

My Phillips HDTV accepts, USB , Media cards such as CF and has the option to display Images on them them as SD resolution or HD

This means I can view then direct of the card as HD images (awesome), Off the camera via composite.. VGA but the camera is not downscaling them , the TV is and iis doing a good job, or via a DVD ( still OK but the "worst")
To complicate matters, when I play the DVD via the Denon1920 and upscale the DVD tp 720p. the image look at least or better than the composite output but nowhere near as good as the HD from media card

I hope this all makes some sence!