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A disk you could pop into a player to see photos on a TV screen? It made sense as soon as I realized what was happening in this mini-revolution in American living rooms: DVDs weren't just for movies.
  technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

DVDs for photographs? You bet! They're not just for movies any more


Dec. 29, 2002


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2002, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2002, The Post-Standard

   This year my Christmas gifts finally caught up with the technological age. Instead of giving a lot of old-fashioned stuff -- ties and toasters and boxes of chocolates -- I gave gifts that spin. I gave home-made DVDs.
   I took old family videos, some of them more than 20 years old, and turned them into video DVDs. I made a DVD out of the digital video tapes I took at my daughter's lakeside wedding in northwest Washington state. I made eight or nine DVD slide shows out of hundreds of still pictures.
   I even made a DVD as a gift to myself. I carefully rescanned 130 black-and-white 35mm photos I took as a war correspondent in Vietnam and put them on a DVD. The images of war, arranged in a slideshow at six-second intervals, make me weep even now, 36 years after I took them.
   That is how powerful DVD-based images can be. I had come full circle. A few months ago I had been wishing for a common, standard way to view digital images without the need to print them -- and without needing a computer.
   Printing a couple of pictures on my photo-quality inkjets wasn't a problem, but showing my friends and neighbors the 81 photos I took at our Halloween party or the 743 pictures we took in the Everglades was simply not something my printers and my schedule were designed to do. (The cost of paper and ink cartridges would have kept me from doing it anyway.)
   But a disk you could pop into a player to see photos on a TV screen? It made sense as soon as I realized what was happening in this mini-revolution in American living rooms: DVDs weren't just for movies.
   Call me the Mad Photographer if you like, but I've become a DVD still-image fanatic. Sure, I make video DVDs, too, but I take a lot more photos than videos. You probably do, too. Doesn't it make sense to show them off on a TV screen?
   I'll confess that I'm also a big fan of big-screen TV, having owned 5-foot and 6-foot sets since the mid-1970s. So when I talk about showing off my pictures on a TV screen, I put a little gusto in my claim.
   Putting your photos onto a DVD to make a slideshow is a three-step process.
   First, you select the pictures you want to use and arrange them in the order you want to show them. I do this in iPhoto on my Mac. Windows programs are able to do much the same sort of thing.
   Then you create a video from the still pictures. iPhoto does this through an "Export" function. I'm not sure how a typical Windows program does it, mostly because I haven't tried a "typical" Windows DVD slideshow program. (All the ones I've used work differently.) But it's fairly simple.
   Then you make a DVD from the video. The slideshow is actually a video (a DVD movie, in other words), and the player doesn't know that it is showing still pictures; it runs the movie.
   I set my slideshows to change images at four- to six-second intervals. Short intervals might seem more tolerant of your viewers' patience, but I've found that viewers who want to linger over any of the photos need to have time to reach for the DVD player's "Pause" button. (You get a perfect still image when you pause a DVD player, and you can leave the player paused for as long as you like. There's no added wear and no reason to move on to the next picture until you're ready.)
   DVD-based still pictures shown on a TV screen don't have all the quality of normal stills shown on a properly adjusted computer screen. They lack some of the computer monitor's precise sharpness and resolution, for example. But this is not as much of a problem as it might seem. Most modern TVs have exceptionally good image quality, and some even match or surpass the display quality of a cheap monitor.
   Best of all, DVDs you make are going to be playable by anybody who has a DVD player and a TV. They'll last a lot longer than video tapes and won't fade the way inkjet photo prints will. It's a combination that's hard to beat.