Gus

Displaying photos via memory stick on Sony

I just bought a Sony KP-65WV700 RPTV - am receiving HD-Net from DirectTV as well as 9 local HDTV channels here in the DFW area. LOVE IT! The picture is so sharp you feel like you are there!
One of the reasons I picked the Sony is that it has a memory stick input for displaying digital still photos. I do not have a Sony digital camera, I have a Kodak and a Canon, but I figured I could get it to work. Interestingly, the manual states "This TV's memory stick viewer cannot display images recorded on still cameras that are not Sony brand." However, they included a loose supplement sheet which implies that images from non-Sony camera may be viewed if the directories are set up per the DCF rules. That basically means setting up a top directory named "DCIM" then subdirectories named "100MSDCF", "200MSDCF", etc. and putting the JPEG pictures in these directories.
I did this with both my Kodak 3:2 pictures and my Canon 4:3 pictures and they display fine. However, especially my Canon pictures, are SuperFine large files, about 1.5 MB each and the Sony TV takes a long time (boring wait) to bring up each picture. Since the TV cannot possibly handle all 4 million pixels, it would make sense to downsize the picture and also compress it to reduce the file size and speed up the operation. The other thing I would like to do is crop the pictures to the 16:9 format so they fill the screen.

BUT, if I make ANY change at all to the original picture, the Sony TV will NOT display it and pops up a "file error" message. I assume that the Sony firmware sees that the photo has been modified and won't show it. So my question is - how can I modify my pictures (in aspect ratio, size, cropping, and any other mods) and save them so that my Sony TV will display them? These digital still pictures look REALLY good on a 65 inch Hi-Def TV! Thanks for any help you can provide.

Scott Barnhart

Gus,

I have a Canon also, and have the same experience as you (on a 40XBR800). The trick is to use a program from Sony called "Picture Gear Lite" to resize/touch-up, etc. It rewrites the EXIF information in the file to comply with what the Sony TV's expect.

You can get a fairly recent version (4.3) here:

ftp://ftp.ita.sel.sony.com/ccpg/pc/PGLite4.3.exe

It has support for batch processing of JPG's, which makes this whole process (which shouldn't be necessary in the first place) much more palatable.

Hope this helps!

Scott Barnhart

Gus

Hi Scott,

Yes, I just downloaded and tried this program out - and it works! Thanks so much! Like you said, it shouldn't be necessary in the first place, but at least now I CAN see my digital pictures on my HDTV.

I just tried a few photos and now I am ready to prepare a decent slide show. Couple questions, if you don't mind.
1. What size (in pixels) would be best (a compromise between time to load and best picture).
2. With a large number of pictures on the memory stick, one can browse the thumbprints, and pick a point to start a manual slide show, where you click to move to the next picture. But in the auto slide show mode, it seems to always start at picture number one, not necessarily what one would want to do. Is there any way to manage the auto slide show? Like if pictures were put into separate folders, can one select a folder, then run just that folder?
Thanks again for your help!

Scott Barnhart

Gus,

Glad it worked for you!

On best size, I am not really sure. I have never found out the exact native resolution (in pixels) of my TV. However, since the two "native" ATSC rates of my TV seem to be 480p and 1080i, I have gone under the assumption that resizing to 1080 pixels vertically is the best. Since my TV is 4x3, I have been resizing to 1440x1080, and they seem to look really good that way! Using the same thinking for your TV, that would give 1920x1080.

I haven't noticed any load-time lag at this size, since I usually use the slideshow, and it loads the next picture while the current one is still on screen.

As far as managing where to start the slideshow, I don't know any way to do what you want. If you have multiple folders, the slide show still seems to start with the 1st picture in the 1st folder, and go from there, going to the next folder when the first is done.

I am not a huge fan of the JPG viewer software inside the Sony TV's - it seems they could have done a LOT more with it for very little effort. I.e. - read any old JPG, and allow some more sophistication of the slideshow. But for easily showing off family photos to interested people, or for putting up a "screen saver" when I don't want to turn off the TV, it works really well.

Scott Barnhart

Gus

I did the same calculation as you, arriving at 1920x1080. I cropped and resized some pictures to this size and they displayed nicely, but were quite slow in coming up. Then I set up some smaller sizes, with vertical pixels of 675, 600, 540, 506, 480, 220 and 100. I found out that anything from 540 and up displayed as full screen. Below 540, the picture displayed correspondingly smaller. Above 540, there was no change in size and I could not see any improvement in picture quality.

So it seems like the TV is scanning the entire picture with 540 lines, then scanning the interlace again at 540 lines, to come up with the final 1080i (interlaced) display. I am just speculating, but that seems to be what is going on. That being the case, you would think then that a picture with 540 vertical pixels would create an overall 1080i scan where the odd and even lines really contain the same picture information. Therefore, if the digital picture was set at 1080 vertical pixels, there should be a noticable difference in quality of the display. But maybe the other weak links in the chain cover up that difference. It would be interesting to understand exactly how this is done.

The other thing I noticed is that the display when watching HDNet is still CONSIDERABLY more clear than the digital picture display via memory stick. So, in my opinion, there is room for further improvement in the way they scan the digital picture and display it. It's not bad, but it could be even better.

I also plugged the same pictures into my Canon G3 and displayed them via the composite video connection and it's easy to see that the memory stick path is much better.

Another strange thing I notice is that when you first press "Memory Stick" it comes up in the last folder, at least the last one I created. And to move down to the lower numbered folders, I have to click on the + folder button. That seems backwards to me.

I have not checked all the possibilities, but it seems to check that the folder name begins with 3 numbers followed by 5 letters. It does not seem to matter what these numbers of letters are. But it will not recognize a folder with numbers alone or letters alone.

Another unusual thing, is that if I leave the file name from my Canon picture alone, like leave it at "IMG_1234.JPG", it displays the file name. But if I rename the file, it does not display it. It's not a big deal, just wonder why they have those filters built in.

But, overall, I'm pleased. I will probably settle for a size of either 1200 by 675 or 1066 by 600 which will give me between 800 to 1200 pictures on a 128 MB memory stick.

Thanks again for your help.

krury

It sounds like the Sony is using DCF format like the Panasonic.
On the Panasonic JPEG's have to be in DCF (Design rule for Camera File system) format. If rotated they won't work or altered or renamed they won't work.

The software mentioned in this post might correct the DCF info after you rename so that it matches, but I haven't checked yet. I have a ton of photos I wanted used on CD-R on DVD player rather than memory stick as it can hold a lot more, but all of them have been recompressed and renamed so won't be in DCF format. I might check out that software. The higher end Panasonic S55S supports HighMAT, which is a MS compatibility feature to take photos from PC to other devices. I don't know if phots still have to follow DCF in that case. If it doesn't I won't need to use softwre to recreate DCF info.