SmugMug to TV

BruceW

I am going to buy a laptop computer to watch SmugMug photos and video on my 52" LCD TV

Has anyone ever done this before? If so any suggestions on laptops, video cards etc?

Thanks

Newsy

BruceW wrote:

I am going to buy a laptop computer to watch SmugMug photos and video on my 52" LCD TV

Has anyone ever done this before? If so any suggestions on laptops, video cards etc?

Thanks

I've read that some laptops do not output full resolution over their HDMI ports.

So if your LCD is 1920x1080p, the laptop might only put out 1280x720p over HDMI. Or maybe it was someone trying to use the HDMI port to connect to a 1920x1200 desktop monitor and it would only provide 1920x1080. Something like that.

I have used my laptop via HDMI to watch 854x480 video on my 720p plasma and it works reasonably well. I was not as impressed when I displayed photos - disappointed in fact. Simply not as sharp as on a good PC monitor.

As for a model recommendation.... there is a new generation of power saving notebooks coming to the market. ASUS has received a lot of press for their new model and its' incredible battery life.

http://www.anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.aspx?i=3665

http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/asus-ul80-and-n61vg-hands-on/

.

colourbox

Don't know if you're Mac or PC but it's worked fine with my last two Mac laptops, MacBook Pro and PowerBook G4. Both can drive an HDTV at full resolution, but I actually select 1280x720 so I can read UI text because it's too small at the highest resolution. I'm sure it's very similar in Windows - just find a cheap monoprice.com cable to connect the best available video port on your laptop with the best available video port on your TV and you oughta be fine.

If photo display is primary, definitely make sure your laptop has DVI or HDMI out. The best connection would be HDMI > HDMI or DVI > HDMI. Next best would be VGA > VGA (sometimes called PC Video on some TVs). Anything else will not look as good.

You may have to mess around with your resolutions and options in your OS monitor preferences, and your picture scaling options on your TV remote, to get the picture to fit the TV properly. Also, it's a good idea to calibrate your TV color, if not with a hardware device then at least run through something like the THX calibrator that you get on DVDs like the Star Wars movies. TVs usually ship with garish color settings.

Smugmug slide shows look best when you've enabled display sizes large enough to fill the TV at full resolution. On public galleries where I limit the maximum size to Medium, Smugmug doesn't look so good because there's no option to scale images up to fill the screen. I suppose serious photogs don't want to watch small images pixelate on enlargement, but on a TV a slide show doesn't look quite right when it doesn't fill the screen...I'd prefer that it be an option. Anyway, if you do limit display sizes and it's a public gallery, you might install the CoolIris plug-in for your Web browser, which has a pretty slick display and can blow up small image sizes to fill the screen.

BradfordBenn

I have used my Nintendo Wii to do this, not hi rez but real easy to do. The PS3 which does Component out does not have a full screen browser. So if you are looking for easy and fast, these could work. They will also allow one to get media off the local network or storage device, which gives much higher resolution. Also you might want to see if your display will take media directly as as USB or SD card.

Not sure if this fits your need, but figured would add the data I have found.

BruceW

Excellent!
Thanks to both of you. I will test with my wii and might even buy a cheap desktop with wi-fi and install a good video card with hdmi outut for a stand alone system.

cmason

BruceW wrote:

Thanks to both of you. I will test with my wii and might even buy a cheap desktop with wi-fi and install a good video card with hdmi outut for a stand alone system.

You may want to take a close look at an Apple Mac Mini. It is tiny, and will output via HDMI, and has built in wifi. You can use the browser of course, but the best experience is to load the photos, from the harddrive (or another machine via wifi) and watch via FrontRow.

You can regularly find these for $499 or so on the Apple refurb store.

The PS3 works very well also, though I can't really recommend the web browser. It works, but it is tough to use. The built in photo viewing app works far better, but of course, like the Mac mini, won't work by pulling images from Smugmug (which works only in the browser). It has a big harddrive for image storage, and will load photos from any other PC in your house, as long as you have Windows Media Center or many other available apps on your PC or Mac.