Instead of firing up your computer each time you want to view your photographs, how about displaying them on your TV? If you have a group of friends and family over to show off those vacation photos, doesn't it make more sense to gather comfortably around the TV instead of crowded around the computer screen? There are many ways to display photos on your TV.
Let's take a look at the variety of 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 TV--it's 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 approach is to use a photo viewing device.
One device I which has served me well is the SanDisk Digital Photo Viewer.
This neat little device 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.
In summary, this approach is similar to using a digital version of a 35mm slide projector, so to speak.
I've also noticed 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 reasonably priced DVD player which also allows you to 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.
Perhaps the best solution of all, is to convert your digital photos to DVD format.
The DVD you generate can then be played back in any DVD player to display all your pictures as a slideshow.
The primary advantage of this method 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.
All you need is a DVD burner and some special software.
Ulead CD and DVD PictureShow are among the best software available for this.
With its easy-to-use wizards, this software allows you to convert all your digital photos to DVD in a few simple 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 if you have doubts.
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.
We have gone over three options for displaying photos on your TV set.
Photos on TV makes much more sense when you have a large group wanting to see your photos.
The method you choose is up to you, but keep in mind that the DVD format will let you show off more of your photos.
Have fun and enjoy!