Iomega's FotoShow™ - Product Review - Evaluation

PSA Journal, March, 2002 by Albert J. Klee

Digital picture frames (e.g., Digi-frame[TM] and Ceiva's Picture Frame) allow you to download digital images from a computer or a digital camera memory card to a picture frame-like device where the images can be viewed one at a time, or as a continuous slide show. I had been considering buying one to use at my camera club before a meeting and during intermission when refreshments are served. I had in mind two possibilities for its use: first, as a recruitment tool for visitors (photos would be interspersed with text slides explaining the activities of the club and the advantages of membership), and secondly, as a short showcase for members' photographs.

There are a number of problems with digital picture frames, however:

1. The viewing size is small (no larger than 4" x 6");

2. Because of the LCD screen in these devices, they must be viewed at an optimal angle and in a dim light to obtain a satisfactory image;

3. The images must be either all verticals or all horizontals, since a vertical in the horizontal format at this size would be much too small to be effective;

4. They tend to be pricey.

Consequently, I went in an entirely different direction and obtained an Iomega FotoShow. It is a device that connects to a TV set and overcomes all of the disadvantages noted above.

The hardware -- its dimensions are 9-1/4" x 5-3/8" x 2" -- is an augmented, USB 250 MB Zip[R] drive, but it will also read and write 100 MB Zip disks. My computer has two USB ports with a 4-port USB hub connected to one of the ports. Although the hub came with a power module, I use it unpowered and all the USB devices connected to it, including the FotoShow Zip drive, work fine.

The rear of the drive unit has RCA connections for both video and audio output, but since sound was not a consideration (the FotoShow manual makes little mention of audio), I simply connected the video to a 13" television set that has A/V inputs. Although the video and audio connections can remain at all times, the USB cable to the unit must be disconnected when using the FotoShow program, located in firmware in the unit. This posed little inconvenience since it was easy to connect and disconnect the USB cable even when the computer was running.

If you don't have a TV with A/V inputs, you must buy an RF Modulator. Although Iomega sells these modulators, the identical unit is sold by Radio Shack (No. 15-1244).

The interface to the FotoShow program is via a remote and although it is fairly ergonomic, it is too bad that Iomega did not opt to allow access to the program via the computer keyboard or mouse. For example, when naming albums (which are simply folders on the Zip disk containing the images) or creating image captions, you are presented with a matrix of letters or numbers. One moves around the matrix using the up, down, right, and left arrow buttons on the remote, and selecting the letter or number by pressing another button. If one could use the computer keyboard, this information could be entered much faster and with far fewer mistakes.

FotoShow requires the baseline (or "standard") JPEG format for your digital images. A compressed file size of about 200KB seems to work best in FotoShow. If you want to fill the TV screen with your image, you should crop it using the 1.33 aspect ratio used by TV sets (and most, but not all, digital cameras), which differs from the 1.5 of slides.

There is a problem, however, in that all television sets crop images that fill the screen. Each manufacturer's TV screen has different specifications, so it is impossible to say how much each image will be cropped on any given TV set. FotoShow provides subframes (called "themes") that will display the entire image, but they do not necessarily utilize the entire TV screen. Therefore, before I compress an image I add a 10% black border around it. An 853 x 1134 pixel image, for example, becomes 896 x 1191 pixels. This fills the entire TV screen with hardly any image loss, and any edges not entirely occupied by the image are made inconspicuous to the viewer by virtue of the black border.

The first step in creating a continuous slide show is to create an album on the Zip disk. The second step is to create a slide show, which basically involves providing a name and selecting the images to be included from any album or albums. A nice touch is that if you name it "Auto," the slide show will start automatically when you start FotoShow. Both of these steps are fairly easy and fast, and voila! -- I have a continuous slide show! Since my A/V TV has audio input, I connected them to a diminutive Radio Shack tape player (SCT-86) that I use for my two-projector slide dissolve programs, providing some nice background music to go along with the slide show.

A really valuable feature -- although Iomega doesn't talk about it -- is that you can connect the unit to a VCR and tape a program (a continuous program, for example, can be taped for one cycle or for as many cycles as the tape will record). The VCR tape then can be played on any TV connected to a VCR without the need for carting the unit around. I did this for a program featuring 27 slides of butterflies, then took the tape over to my son's house at a family gathering and played it on his 37-inch TV set.