[bradvoy]

I'm very close to buying a Panasonic PT-50LC14. It's got a great picture, decent price, and enough brightness to look good in my brightly lit family room.


One feature of this set that appeals to me but that I've seen no discussion of is the slots on the front that allow a memory card to be plugged in for direct viewing of digital photos. Does anyone use this feature? How well does it work? I presume the pictures are scaled to 1280x720 for display; is the scaling done well? How much control do you have over playback speed?


I take a lot of digital pictures on my hiking, backpacking, and Jeeping outings, and I often have a fair number of people over to look at them. Currently this requires crowding around the 19" computer monitor or else burning them to CD-R and displaying them on my 26" TV via my Panasonic DVD player. The DVD player (connected to the TV via S-Video) does a pretty poor job of displaying pictures; a lot of detail is lost and scenes with a lot of contrast often look "jittery". Still, the seating arrangements in the family room are so much better than in the computer room that we often end up viewing pictures this way.


I realize that I'll be able to connect a computer directly to the PT-50LC14 and view pictures that way. But the memory card slot would be a lot quicker and easier in many cases. I'm curious how well this works.

 

[hughh]

Why not take a CF to your dealer and test it out? If you do, please let us know your findings.


BTW - I saw the 60"LCD at UE last week and was really impressed by

it's PQ.

 

[BillJ]

I have the Panasonic PT-60LCX63 which has the slots for viewing photos. I haven't fooled with it too much, but I have tried it. Works great. Pictures look good and the scaling seems fine. I have an Olympus C-3030Z camera which uses Smartmedia cards. I bought an Olympus MAPC-10 PC Card adapter on eBay for about 15 bucks. The SmartMedia card from the camera goes into the MAPC-10 adapter, then the MAPC-10 PC Card goes into the Panasonic's slot.

 

[NVboy]

I consider it a shoddy novelty at best. I take thousands of pictures each year, and the only way I will look at them is via a PC monitor. I also have a DVD player that will display photos burned onto a CD, but it is so agonizingly slow it is laughable. If you need a quick fix to show people some pictures in a rush, I suppose the card slot will do okay. If you really want people to ooh and ahh over your great pictures, have them crowd around your PC monitor. Don't expect to be impressed, especially if you are really into quality photos. Hughh has an excellent suggestion which I also second. Take your favorite memory card (with adapter if needed) into a store and plug it in. Make your own judgement.

 

[Danabw]

Pics look fine on the TV for casual viewing...I would agree that you should take your SD card to a local dealer and see for yourself. Whether or not this is a useful feature is very subjective of course - one man's "looks good" is another's "simply awful."


One word of caution...I found that SD cards from three different HP cameras would not work in the slot (tried two different TVs). The thumbnails would paint, but it would not display the images full screen. Same SD card used w/pics from two other cameras (Oly & Canon) worked fine.

 

[bradvoy]

Quote:

Originally posted by NVboy I consider it a shoddy novelty at best.... If you really want people to ooh and ahh over your great pictures, have them crowd around your PC monitor. Don't expect to be impressed, especially if you are really into quality photos.

What display issues led you to consider the picture card slot a shoddy novelty? Was it the fact that the pictures are scaled to just 1280x720 resolution? Or were there issues with color rendering? Or other issues that led to poor display of photos?


I realize that photos won't display as well on the Panasonic as they do on a good CRT computer monitor. But I'm hoping they display well enough. My current method of burning them to CD and then viewing them via my DVD player is NOT good enough. I don't have the slowness problem mentioned above with my DVD player (Panasonic S27), but the scaling down to 480 vertical pixels causes a lot of loss in detail and some pictures look "jittery" on screen.


The photo card reader feature isn't a make or break decision maker for me; I've decided the Panasonic LCD is the right TV for me for other reasons. But if photo display is pretty good, that would be a bonus. The suggestion several of you have made to take a memory card with me to the store and try it out is a good one, and I'll do that next time I go in.


Danabw, your experience with images from HP cameras not displaying properly is interesting. I wonder if the HP cameras fail to follow the DCF specification. The Panasonic manual says it only supports memory cards that follow this specification. The DCF specification has some rules about folder and file naming that might not be observed by the HP cameras.


Thanks again to everyone for your input.

 

[KalEl]

Brad,


We have the PT-50LC14 and use it to display photos from our Sony Memory Stick. I think it does a pretty good job. The color is good and the pictures aren't jittery. It doesn't have the same resolution as a PC monitor, which is the biggest draw back, but then again, you get to see your photos giant-sized, which is pretty cool. You have the option to go through them manually on in a slide show.


I think it's a useful option and a benefit to having the Panny. Our kids love seeing photos displayed on the big screen.

 

[NVboy]

Quote:

Originally posted by KalEl Brad, We have the PT-50LC14 and use it to display photos from our Sony Memory Stick. I think it does a pretty good job. The color is good and the pictures aren't jittery. It doesn't have the same resolution as a PC monitor, which is the biggest draw back, but then again, you get to see your photos giant-sized, which is pretty cool. You have the option to go through them manually on in a slide show. I think it's a useful option and a benefit to having the Panny. Our kids love seeing photos displayed on the big screen.

I can understand how kids would be impressed, but I don't think that impression will carry over to adults with a critical eye.


bradvoy,


The lowest resolution I shoot at is 2272x1704. Even at that low of a resolution, it is like viewing a completely different picture on the Panny as opposed to a monitor. I think most of my pictures off CD load slowly because they are between 2.5-10mb each. I just think too much detail is lost. Colors are okay, but I'd rather see a highly defined photo on screen rather than one with great colors (I can always blame the color problems on bad exposure settings). Anyway, if you have extremely low-rez photos more in line with the set's resolution, they may display quite well. I haven't tried that out yet.


But, good to hear that you've decided on the set. I think you will really like it as much as the rest of us happy Panny LCD owners.

 

[bradvoy]

Quote:

Originally posted by NVboy The lowest resolution I shoot at is 2272x1704. Even at that low of a resolution, it is like viewing a completely different picture on the Panny as opposed to a monitor. I think most of my pictures off CD load slowly because they are between 2.5-10mb each. I just think too much detail is lost....

Most of my photos are 2048x1536. None of the computer monitors at my home or office can display a photo this size without scaling it down. Most of the computers I use are running at 1280x1024 or 1024x768 pixels. The photos look good scaled down this far, although the quality varies depending on the software I use to view them. Some programs scale photos better than other programs do, and some programs scale different types of photos better than others (such as portraits vs landscapes).


The Panasonic's 1280x720 resolution isn't much less than the computer monitors I'm used to working with. So theoretically it should look nearly as good as what I'm used to seeing on computer monitors. But it will also depend on how well suited the Panasonic's scaling algorithm is to my photos.

 

[southerngent]

I use my card ready to show the pics I take to extended family members when they visit. It works GREAT and you can adjust the speed and fade type of the display (as a slide show or view them individually). You can rotate and zoom if needed

 

[ceccacci]

I've got an LC13, and I'd second the recommendation of taking a memory card to a store and trying it out. I think it's a great feature for slide shows and the like, and it doesn't work too bad. When it works at all that is.


I use a Minolta A1 with compact flash cards. I can put the CF cards in a PCCard adapter and use them in the set, but it will only read ones that are too small for practical use. Put a 16MB card in there and everything is fine. Put a 256MB or 1GB card in it and, while it seems to see the correct number of images, it gets errors whenever it tries to open one.

 

[NVboy]

Quote:

Originally posted by ceccacci I use a Minolta A1 with compact flash cards. I can put the CF cards in a PCCard adapter and use them in the set, but it will only read ones that are too small for practical use. Put a 16MB card in there and everything is fine. Put a 256MB or 1GB card in it and, while it seems to see the correct number of images, it gets errors whenever it tries to open one.

That could be because of a number of things. I don't have any problem with my 2gb Hitachi microdrives.

 

[NVboy]

Quote:

Originally posted by bradvoy The Panasonic's 1280x720 resolution isn't much less than the computer monitors I'm used to working with.

OK, but I bet none of your PC monitors are the same size as the Panny. Resolution doesn't really mean much when you are talking about 2 enormously different sized displays. That much is very evident to me when photos get blown up so large on the Panny, which is where all of my complaints stem from. I actually show pictures on mine once in a great while, but I try to avoid it like the plague.

 

[ceccacci]

Quote:

Originally posted by NVboy That could be because of a number of things. I don't have any problem with my 2gb Hitachi microdrives.

Could very well be because of a number of things. My point though is that someone considering this as a selling point should try it out first with their own cards, because it doesn't always work smoothly. For me, while it would be nice it if worked, the card slot had no bearing on my decision to buy the TV, so I've not even bothered to call Panasonic and try to resolve the issue.

 

[NVboy]

Quote:

Originally posted by ceccacci Could very well be because of a number of things. My point though is that someone considering this as a selling point should try it out first with their own cards, because it doesn't always work smoothly. For me, while it would be nice it if worked, the card slot had no bearing on my decision to buy the TV, so I've not even bothered to call Panasonic and try to resolve the issue.

Well said & point taken. And people thought Beta vs VHS was ugly? Whatever. That doesn't even come close to the huge variety of memory types we have now, none of which will work with the other. Name brand, generic, proprietary (Sony), etc. With so many media types, problems are bound to exist.