JPEG Picture questions (DVD/VCR/Digital Camera)

Question: My pop bought an Olympus 4.0 megapixel digital camera. He likes to view the pictures from the camera on his 50+ inch HDTV. We plug the camera directly into the VCR and can view beautifully detailed and crisp pictures that fill the entire screen. However, it's cheaper to store them on CD than buy new chips.

His DVD player can play CDs with JPEGs. So, I downloaded the files from the chip in the camera to a CD-ROM. We play the CD in the DVD player and the pictures are fuzzy.

No change in the file, just a copy and paste. I've tried changing the scanning on the DVD player, to no avail. I've viewed the pictures on my computer and, though large, they can be shrunk to reasonable size and maintain great clarity. He says on his computer (17" monitor) they look fuzzy.

We're wondering why there is a difference in clarity from the chip through the VCR and on the CD through the DVD player. Any thoughts and help would be appreciated. My thoughts are that the VCR is like a slide projector and takes the image, no matter what size and makes it work and that the DVD player is taking an actual picture that only looks good at a certain size and is trying to blow it up to fit the screen. He's worried that he lost his "good pictures" off the chip when I downloaded them and that he'll not be able to get the clarity back. I told him not to worry, that I could copy them back to an empty chip when he wanted to view them.

Some questions first:

What models of DVD players are you using?
Some DVD players can take a CD-ROM that just has jpegs on it (the players have a built-in slideshow).

Have you looked at your CD-ROM on several DVD players?
If it is using a slideshow display built into the DVD player (just a CD-ROM of pictures) then it could be subpar display code. There may be a firmware upgrade for the DVD player available from the manufacturer.

Have you looked at the pictures on the CD-ROM on your computer?
Your monitor probably has higher resolution than your tv. If you cannot see a difference in the quality of the images on the CD versus on your harddrive, then the jpegs on the CD should be fine. You can also compare file size.

I use Nero's CD burning software and there is a feature to put pictures to CD and make a VCD (video CD). I can set it to slideshow with a pause of my choosing or I can leave the pause "infinite" and step through all of the images with my remote. Picture quality does not seem diminished and I am viewing on a 33" television. The one problem that I have with this is that the software only permits 99 picture files (regardless of size) even though the CD itself is capable of storing much much more data. I don't know if this is a limitation in Nero, a limitation in the VCD design standard, or what.

I don't believe that my system supports a CD that just contains JPGs.

I haven't put jpegs from a digital camera to CD yet. My brother just got one around Christmas and he noticed that some of his pictures that looked sharp on a 20" tv screen looked blurier when he printed them out (these were photos with natural light, no flash). Here are some troubleshooting tips:

If it is using a slideshow display built into the DVD player (just a CD-ROM of pictures) then it could be subpar display code. There may be a firmware upgrade for the DVD player available from the manufacturer.

I'll bet that may be the cause. The DVD player is a 2003 model Toshiba (can't remember the model #). It has a slide show and knows when you are using a picture cd. I'm thinking that, because the TV monitor is so big, the pictures are just getting distorted and that, on a smaller monitor, they'd be fine. It's funny that when I hook it up from the camera through the VCR (just using line 2), the pictures look great on that big monitor.

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