Who actually needs to frame their holiday snaps anymore? Nobody. You show them as slideshows. But if you took those pictures with a digital camera, the old-school “diapositive party” is dead. The alternative is playing a slideshow on your TV. You need a CD burner. You need burning software to create Video-CDs or Super-Video-CDs. And you need a DVD player that can read the Video-CD format. Most current devices handle this standard just fine.
Preparing the Images for the Big Screen
Before you burn anything, you have to prep the shots. Use the image editing software that came with your camera. Resize the images to the right format. Here is the catch. The Video-CD format only displays 352 by 288 pixels on the TV. The Super-Video-CD format pushes it to 704 by 576 pixels. That is a significant difference in clarity.
Want to load larger images? That works too. You can just zoom in on the TV to check out the details. Save the files as JPEG. The file size shrinks. The quality loss is minimal. Do not be stingy with the file size though. High-resolution images fit hundreds of photos on a single CD-ROM.
“You can zoom in on the TV to check out the details.”
So why go through this trouble? Because watching hundreds of photos on a 15-inch monitor is tedious. A big screen changes the experience. It turns a private review into a shared event. The tech is dated. The method is clunky. But the result? It works. You make a disc. You pop it in. You watch.
