http://aroundcny.com/technofile/texts/tec040603.html

April 6, 2003

By Al Fasoldt Copyright c 2003, Al Fasoldt Copyright c 2003, The Post-Standard

What's the best way to show your digital images to your friends and family? Forget making prints from your money-eating inkjet. Use your TV instead.

There's an easy way to do this and a hard way. The hard way, which I wrote about last December, is to make a DVD that contains a slideshow of your images. But this is far from cheap — DVD burners and blank, recordable DVD disks cost about five times what equivalent CD burners and disks cost. And editing a DVD to make a photo slideshow sometimes takes a lot of time.

The easy way? Burn your images to a CD and pop it into your DVD player. There's a catch, of course. You have to own a DVD player that can show still pictures.

But this isn't an expensive proposition. My wife and I grabbed a Memorex MVD2028 DVD player at a local store last month when we saw the price (about $80) and the specs. The sign over a pile of Memorex boxes said the player was able to play DVDs, video CDs, MP3 CDs and "Kodak Picture CDs" — a euphemism of a sort for any CDs that have JPEG images on them.

My life as an avid digital photographer changed that day. I could not be happier. The new Memorex player is outstanding as a standard DVD player — it has component video outputs as well as normal video connections and an S-Video jack, and even has a switchable progressive-scan function that provides superbly stable video for high-end TVs — and it performs very well as an audio CD player and MP3 player. It can even provide 3D sound from movie sound tracks.

But it's the still-picture display that has me excited. Other players probably have the same capability (they tend to be made in the same factories, with the same innards), but the MVD2028 is the first JPEG-capable DVD player I've tried, and I'm a fan for life.

Here's why. I'm already in the habit of storing my digital pictures on CDs. To show them, I simply play the CDs.

When you put a CD full of JPEG images into the player, the Memorex MVD2028 figures out in a second or two that the disk isn't a DVD or audio CD and switches itself into still-picture mode. If the pictures are in the main directory of the CD (if they're not in folders), the player shows you the file list on the TV screen. If the images are in folders, you'll see the folders; clicking a button on the remote control when a folder is highlighted opens the folder to show the contents.

You can show all the pictures or just the ones you want to see. Each one is shown for a couple of seconds, fading into the next picture smoothly.

The player had no problem with normal-size photos, the kind that most digital cameras take (in the 1- to 3-megapixel range). Even the photos from my 5-megapixel camera displayed quickly. When I played a CD containing very large scans — 60-megabyte scans of slides taken in Paris and 270-megabyte scans of war images I took in Vietnam — the player took a noticeable time decoding the photos between images in the slideshow. (JPEG photos are encoded and must be decoded to be viewed.) I didn't find the delay a problem.

I was able to put the player into "Pause" on individual images. The timing of the slide show can't be adjusted otherwise.

On both our "normal" TV and our large-screen set, images looked much better than I expected. TVs are not as sharp and detailed as computer screens, yet my photos were bright and richly detailed. Maybe I'm being fooled a little by my own prejudice — after all, I was looking at my own photos, and I'm proud of them — but I suspect my Congregationalist upbringing has a counterbalancing effect on such pride.

Because Memorex insists on referring to "Kodak Picture CD" instead of plain old JPEG images on a CD, I checked playback with one of the Picture CDs I had on hand. It did fine. (Picture CDs contain JPEGs in their own folder.) I also tried, without luck, to get the player to show images in other formats. Only JPEGs worked.