Jpegs on DVD's

I'm sure you must have answered this question before but I am new to your forum and cannot find an answer.
Why do my photos look dreadful when viewed on a DVD player with Jpeg facility? My photos look great on my Mac monitor but as soon as I burn them onto a disc and view them on my TV they turn into a pixelated mess.
I have tried reducing the resolution on my Mac before burning but the results are just as bad.
I await your help with great anticipation.
p.s I am using a 7m pixel camera.

The 'pixelated mess' blame is caused by TV poor resolution (512 lines is current U.S. broadcast standard); PAL is different. If you go to the HDTV monitors you can get closer, but still NOT equal to computer monitors!

I live in the UK so we have a few more lines than your goodself but your comment on HDTV monitors is interesting as I took my CD to my local Sony franchise and he loaded my photos onto a DVD player and viewed them on a £1500 HDTV ready Sony. Guess what. Results still rubbish. The sales assistant was totally bemused and had no answers.

A lot of HDTV units only support 768 pixels vertically, whereas the best units support 1080 pixels vertically. Could be also that the problem is that your photo CD still has much higher pixel count, and the pixel reduction used by the TV is horrid.

Thank you for your interest and your comments all of which I understand but I'm still stuck with the problem of how can I show my photos on the TV. My family refuse to crowd around the Mac and I cannot afford to print off all my photos.Is there another alternative. What about DVD players that have hard drives and USB connections?

My point is to change the resolution of the photos to whatever pixel count best matches TV standards! So use Photoshop, for example, to reduce the super high resolution from your camera down to something better matched to the TV.

If you use projectors to show things from a PC, when the screen resolution does not match the native resolution of the projector, images will ALWAYS be inferior to those that are at native resolution of the device, as software interpolation of other resolutions will be inferior in quality to native resolution.

In order to take advantage of the HDTV you need to connect it to the computer using DVI input. Most HDTV today offer only the HDMI connection w/ afew offering DVI or both. The problem is that most DVD player are design to play movies and such for TV and not for PC quality.

Could the program you are using be reducing the quality of the pics? I made a DVD for my father-in-law and his friends. They wanted a trip DVD, three different cameras and resolutions and they all looked fine.

How does the DVD look when played on your PC?


ByteTheBullet (-:

My Mac only has a CD burner but if photos look OK on a DVD disc then that is another good reason for me to buy the latest iMac. I think I will experiment on my freinds PC first and see what kind of results I get. Thank you.I still cannot get my head round this "resolution " business. How come my digital movie images look OK on my TV and why do some still shots that I take on my digital movie camera look OK ?That only has 1.9m pixels .I've just burnt another disc dropping the resolution to 640 x 480.Still rubbish but not as bad as my other efforts. Ahhhhhhhhhhhh

Digital movies only have 640 x 480 resolution! A single frame from that movie is no different than the movie itself.

I'm out of ideas, if you tried that already!

Well I took some more photos using an old Fuji 2m pixel camera. Burnt it dropping the resolution to 640x480 and the resulting images looked like old Kodak 400 a.s.a film.
I think this is the best I'm going to get. Shame realy. Great camera equipment, great computer equipment,crap TV's. Thank you all for your time and help.

Even if played on a HD screen, DVD is not an HD format. There are HD disc formats around, but nothing really standarised yet.

David

Agreeed...once yo lower the quality to the TV;s level it will look better...sad, but true...

coppi123,
I backup all my full size (4368x2912px with my 5D and 3072x2048px with my 10D) jpeg photos to CDr, and can just drop the CD into my or someone else's DVD player (assuming the DVD player shows jpeg files) and the jpeg photos show up great (to there eyes) I have confirmed this on three DVD players that the full size jpeg file shows up great on a TV (even on a large LCD TV). Of course if viewing less then 6 inches away a print will beat a TV
Oh yea, even my wife's Canon A300 photos show up great