Features - Photos

The first multimedia capability I checked out was photo display. The 510 is designed to allow you to display either a slideshow or individual photos on your TV and this feature generally worked well. The basic idea is that you navigate through your photo directories on your TV using the 510 remote, then select either a single photo or a directory of photos for playback.

The amount of time each photo stays on the screen is configurable, as is the transition effect (fade to black, fade to white or none) between photos. Photos larger than your TV resolution are also scaled to fit the screen. This worked, but I found the scaling a bit on the poor side, with visible jagged lines in some cases.

The 510 supports a number of different image formats including JPEG, JPEG2000, TIFF, BMP (Non-compressed), PNG and GIF. Directories of photos can either be displayed as a list or as a collection of thumbnails (Figure 5).

Figure 5: Photo Thumbnail Menu

The thumbnail display was nice, but I found it to be fairly slow, as the thumbnails seem to be generated on the fly, taking 15-20 seconds each time I entered a directory. For more info on a single photograph, an "info" screen was available that displayed image metadata. But if you look closely at Figure 6, you'll see the picture was identified as a BMP when it actually was a JPEG image.

Figure 6: Photo Information

One odd behavior I had with the slideshow capability was its screen saver. Five minutes into a running sideshow, the unit's screen saver would come on, blacking out my images until I hit a key to bring them back. Oops. I also found that the screen saver would often not come on after I finished a short slide show and returned to the photo menu. It was just the opposite behavior you would expect. If you have a TV that is susceptible to burn-in, be careful.

Tags: D-Link, HDMI, Media Player,

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