I have been trying to learn how to take video, and finally reach the point where I decided I ought to have a Blu-ray player. Notice that I avoided the word need. On is supposed to be able to burn regular DVDs from HD camcorder files and play them on a Blu-ray player. Blu-ray players are closer to being computers that they are to being DVD players. You have wait for them to boot up and there are seemingly endless software updates to download from the internet.

After looking it up on the net, I decided to get a Sony Playstation 3 for use a Bly-ray player. It supposedly has good software, and it has a built-in ahrd disk and Wi-Fi connection to get the software updates. It also plays games, I’m told, but I haven’t tried that yet. It definitely plays Blu-ray disks quite well.

I noticed that in addition to playing video, the Playstation 3 claims to be able to display jpg image files. To try it out, I copied a bunch of jpgs onto the DVD burner in my PC. A bunch turned out to be 339 images, all left at full resolution and including vertical images and skinny panoramas.

I put the DVD into the Playstation and, just like the computer it is, it did nothing without being told. I found Photos on the main menu and copied the files to the hard disk, although it would have played directly from the DVD. The player automatically sorts the images by date into folders. It creates a folder for each month having images. With some additional fooling around, I found the slide show option and started the show.

It worked like a champ, automatically resizing the images for the HD screen format. The slide show mode advances the images by sliding the old image off to the left and sliding the new one on from the right. There are album modes as well. I’m always amazed when anything with software works as advertised.

Slide projectors disappeared a decade ago, and since then there has been no way to bore a whole group of people with large-screen images. Now we have a way of doing that. The world has been set right again.

There is a tutorial on organizing slide shows on the QSA site.