We've just got a panasonic viera 37 inch hd ready plasma tv, and I want to make a slide show of my photos that are around 2816 x 2112 res. I tried it with nero but they must either compress the photos or my dvd player not being HD cant display the photos in their full res. Any ideas>?

The best your DVD player can do is 480. (720x480 or 640x480). I'm not sure what you are doing in Nero. Slide-show videos are MPEG-2, again at 480i/p. If you are creating a disc of JPG files, again your DVD player is 480i/p.

Is that the same if you have an upscaling DVD player like the Oppo I see some users mentioning?


gregtherotterius:

Even if the DVD player was capable of outputting 2816 x 2112 resolution, no consumer displays have that high resolution (1080P capable displays are only 1920 x 1080 even).

"Upscaling" is largely marketing hype. You're still watching a 480 source image, it's just being displayed at 1080. The real benefits from upscaling DVD players is in the use of the HDMI connect, (digital vs analog connect), and in having the image upscaled at the source rather than in the monitor. Some monitors may well have superior upscaling.

I can't say for sure what any given player would do with a jpg disc, there may well be differences between players. But all MPEG video (AKA slide-show) will be 480.

I was referring to these players ability to output at 720P/1080P resolutions. Standard DVD standalones only output at 480i/P I know, even for machines capable of reading JPEG format.

Read my comment again. There's no difference between a player that upscales and one that does not, except the upscaling player has an HDMI connect. All it's doing is upscaling the image, which is the same thing your monitor does. It's STILL a 480i/p image source. You can't create pixels where none exist.

If an image from an upscaling player "looks" better on your monitor, 75% of the time it's because of using the HDMI connect rather than analog component connects. The other 25% will be due to monitors that have poor upscaling or no upscaling at all. Upscaling does nothing but help to display the image a bit smoother, it doesn't make the image "sharper". TO put it another way, even if the image was not upscaled in the player, it would look noticeably better via an HDMI connect. The monitor would still upscale it to the monitor's native resolution for display.

You can't create pixels where none exist, all you can do is duplicate ones that do exist. This is what upscaling is doing.

thanks for the help everyone, I connected my pc and set the output of my graphics card to 1080p and connected it with a dvi<>hdmi cable to my tv and the photos were in proper hd res.

And that's the way it's done.

Gotta build me a HTPC one of these days. Are you pleased with the image quality on the TV for normal PC activities? Tried any games or movies?

The image quality is brilliant, Its not such a breeze reading text tho. You could change the dpi to a make text larger. I tried clear type, helped only very slightly. Didnt really get to try it much with games. For some reason F.E.A.R would only output 1024 x 768, but I hadnt installed any patches so that was probably why. I couldnt really test for ghosting either. I didnt notice any when playing back some mpeg4 music videos if thats any consolation. The other downside, is that the image will either be a little too big or small for all HDTV tv's as it isnt PROPER hdtv i think. If you go into device settings, theres an option for underscaling or something. The image I had was creeping past the sides of the screen, I had to enable this thing which made the image a bit smaller, leaving a 2cm gap around the top and sides of the screen. Then it was perfect. I dont think you would have these issues if you connected to a HD service or hd-dvd player.

But yeah, if it was my tv and not my parents in the lounge I would have it there for playing games, viewing photos, photoshopping, but not for surfing the net or writing documents. I just couldnt get used to using a keyboard and mouse while sat on the couch.

CDan:

I was not specific enough in my last post. What I was referring to was these players ability to display JPEG files which are not at 720x480/576 resolution which is the resolution output of standard DVD players. I was just curious if the upscaling players which supported reading of JPEG format would be able to output them at 720/1080 resolution.

What ever the output resolution, for 2816 x 2112 resolution images, downscaling will be required, even on majority of PC displays.