I got a new digital camera and it has a video output. Very nice. I can hook it up to my TV (any TV with an RCA video input) and watch a slideshow of the images and little .MOVs I've captured. It is great entertainment, especially since the TV offerings are mostly re-runs this summer. The inconvenient part is plugging in the camera. It uses batteries up quickly, especially when outputting video. That means I also have to have it plugged into an adapter.

So I thought... They have printers now with media slots that will print images directly from the smartmedia or compact flash card. It makes sense to me that adding such slots to a TV would be fairly simple, and add considerable value to the TV.

I also thought... My home computers are all networked together. If the TV had an ethernet jack it could be designed to search networked drives for image "playlists" and simply access the images over the network. You could control the timing and transitions of the slide show, and possibly even coordinate music from your CD changer with the slides.

I used to take tons of conventional 35mm slide pictures. I have a slide projector, and would get it out occasionally to look at my slides. But the inconvenience of it all made me quit taking pictures. Now that images are digital, the processing time and expense is eliminated. They can be viewed on a high resolution PC monitor or printed on a higher resolution inkjet printer. Images that didn't look so hot used to get printed anyway, at our expense. Film used to be consumable, and expensive. With digital images we can delete the ones we don't like, and print only the ones worth printing at whatever size we'd like them. Assuming roughly the same start-up expense (I actually paid more for my old 35mm camera than I did for my digital camera) I'll bet digital photography will eventually be the standard, and consumable film photography will eventually die out. If the next generation of digital TVs can access digital photos and movies from media cards or the network, I'll bet the inkjet printing industry will start shrinking, and perhaps be forced into selling ink cartridges and photo grade paper at reasonable (i.e. cheap) prices.

So, does it make sense to anyone else to put media slots and/or a network jack on TVs?! Especially on HDTVs? Heck, Sony could even put a memory stick slot on their TVs, and they SHOULD! It makes sense to me and I WANT ONE!

Dave

Dave,

I am sure therer is a market for these features, but not from me...for the same reasons I don't buy TV/VCRs, TV/DVDs or the Panasonic Tripple Play (TV,VCR & DVD). I prefer a plain monitor...give me higher quality for the money by keeping the frills out. All this A/V switching, tuners, speakers and amps are a waste of my money (redundant) and, many times take up extra space, create extra heat and/or interference that I would prefer to not have.

FYI, there are already boxes that take the digital cards and create a "photo show" on a PC, Mac, regular TV and some even have their own built-in display. They range from $200 to $500. Iomega (the Zip people) and Kodak come to mind.

As far as the network jack, I feel it should be on the A/V processor as a source input (and provide control and feedback to control systems) or as a separate "source" box like it is now. Of course, streaming video will have to improve greatly before I would routinely watch it, much less pay for it!

randy

Good points, Randy.

As I've thought more about it, I've also come to the conclusion that it makes just as much sense to put memory media reading ability into A/V receiver/amps. Since my current one handles routing of all my current media sources to my TV and speakers, adding just a few more media abilities would seem natural. I'd still add an ethernet port, possibly a couple of USB, and a firewire port to the thing too. Ethernet wouldn't be to access the internet. Instead it would be to access media files on PCs in my home network. USB would allow USB printers to print out any images and possibly playlists or TV schedules you've created and want a hard copy of. USB could also be the path that smartmedia and other memory card media gets into the device through. I already have a USB smartmedia reader for my computer. Firewire is the digital video standard, generally. Heck, it may become the "one cable" standard for connecting all home theater devices together. I'd vote for that.

Of course at this point the reciever is essentially a mutimedia computer, and I coulda just added a PC to my stereo rack and been happy in the first place. So I think I'll step back 10 steps...

Just give me a smartmedia slot in my HDTV. They put them in LCD picture frames. I just think my HDTV should be able to show ALL my visual media, and putting a smartmedia slot on it would allow me a simple way to "install" media files for it to display.

I'd gladly pay an extra $30 for the feature, since that's how much I paid for my USB smartmedia reader.

Dave

TechTV's show with John Dvorack recently discussed HDTV and why it is so slow being adopted, etc.

The main reason they decided people aren't buying it is that in most areas of the country there is very little content in HDTV format to watch. Of course, until more people buy them the price is going to stay high, and that's the second most popular reason people don't buy them.

I think endowing HDTV sets with a way to serve as a digital image viewer would help sell sets. There are many nights at my house where what's on TV sucks and I turn it off and just listen to music. If the TV could serve up a nice slide show of digital images I'd keep it on. Of course, the resolution of my current NTSC TV far underwhelms my digital camera pictures. HDTV would be a natural mate for such.

Just me thinking again.

Dave