Richard wrote:Donshan does this stuff all the time and visits regularly.
Must be busy or something...
Yes, been doing yard work and staining a cedar fence- put on 30 gallons!
I have used a lot of jpeg pictures in videos, but I am still working in standard def miniDV format that is 720x480 pixels. I have not done slide shows, but put the jpeg stills into the video and pan and zoom ( al la Ken Burns effect) to simulate motion. Maybe someday I can get a HDTV video camera, And I agree the quality of the jpeg stills goes down when you display at SD resolutions off of DVDs. But there are things to watch for.
So I can't address the question directly, but have a few ideas of the problems, and let me emphasize I am doing what I call a SWAG- " A Scientific Wild A**ed Guess":
Most digital cameras can take photos now that exceed the resolution of HDTV. This may be part of the problem- expectations are too high.
On the other hand this may be a scaling problem, or JPEG compression throwing away color info, or the quality of the original picture or a DVD MPEG compression problem. so a few comments on each.
1. Scaling: The ASTC digital standard formats for digital TV monitors are :
1080p= 1920x 1080 pixels
1080i = 1920 x 1080 pixels
720p = 1280 x 720 pixels
480i/p = 704 x 480 or 640x 480 pixels
If you were to feed these digital displays a jpeg digital image with a different pixel ratio than your native display something has to re-scale the picture. Richard has written at length about the problems or rescaling. So first I would be sure the photos are sized in pixels to the native size of the display. I would think this would be especially important for a LCD with a fixed number of pixels. If the LCD were 1280x720 and you feed it a jpeg that is 2048x1536 pixels on a digital connection (DVI/HDMI) something has to scale it down to 1280x 720 and may screw it up.
2. JPEG compression- Each of the pixels gets bits of brightniess data, and color data. As you increase JPEG compression it throws away color info. At the Higest settings in the software I doubt this is the problem and you have plenty of color bits left. High setting JPEG is very good.
3. Image quality-Here the art and science of digital photography come in and volumes have been written. I have found that using Photoshop or Photoshop Elements software on a digital image and adjusting the image can do WONDERS for the image quality even at 720x480.
Most digital pictures as your average person takes them, do not have the gray scale range set to the optimum. In Photoshop this is called "levels". You want to set the range of the digital photo so it the black point and the white points of the photo match what is in the scene. In practice the software plots a graph of the actual brightness scale- black on the left and white on the right and displays the actual brightness as a "hump" . Sliders let you set the white and black points to match the image and set the mid gray level. Think of it as "calibration of the image" for your "calibrated monitor". I just got an Epson RX500 "all in one" scanner/photo printer and when scanning a paper print to digitize it the software in the "professional" mode has the exact same levels settings to apply to a preview scan. It makes the digital scan of a paper photo print much better.
Next the color may be wrong due to lighting and or over/under exposure. This can be corrected along with contrast. Sometimes a boost of color saturation helps.
Finally a bit of edge sharpening sometimes improves the illusion of a sharper image- but can be overdone just as in a monitor display.
I do these steps on EVERY digital photo and with practice it can be done in five minutes and then save the JPEG file again with a new name at HIghest JPEG settings. By taking the photos at 2048x 1536 pixels it also lets me crop the picture for better composition as I have pixels to throw away. It also lets me use the computer software to pan a 720x480 box over a larger pixel image to create the illusion of motion on a still. You see this all the time on TV documentaries.
Finally the image MUST be in sharp focus when you take it- Lots of automatic cameras produce blurry images. We have a Olympus 3.2 mega-pixel and I find the sports setting to give high shutter speed priority is best for most shots, as it assures subject motion or moving the camera yourself does not blur the image. It does require good lighting. I also found that this Olympus did not have a good enough glass lens to take pictures better than 2048x1530 at a JPEG level that produced about 803Kb per picture. It would take more pixels and a better JPEG compression, but the lens did not have the relsolution. Test the camera at all its quality settings and see if you can see a difference on a good computer monitor to see what the camera lens can do.
4. The standard DVD is limited to the 704x 480 pixel resolution of SDTV. So the idea of using an upscaling DVD player seems a good one while matching the JPEG pixel ratio to the display pixel ratio. Also in burning a DVD the MPEG compression can do ANOTHER hatchet job on quality. DVD making software that lets you set the bit rate up to max should be done. My toshiba has bit rate settings on DVD quality from 2.2 up to 9.2. they don't give units ,but any DVD that gets more than 60 minutes on a standard 4.7Gb blank is not at top MPEG quality.
Hopes this helps