Improvements to photo quality
I recently received an email pointing me to this thread about photo quailty in Media Center. Turns out in previous releases we were down sampling all photos to 1024×768 regardless of your resolution (clearly a bad thing to do if you have a 1080 display). The fix we have implemented in Windows Vista is to down sample the photo to match your resolution. We’re all wondering why we didn’t do that in the first place :).
Actually, MC isn’t the only application that did that. There are many others that will only downsample to one resolution, regardless of the user’s actual resolution.
I believe, if I’m not mistaken, Picasa still does that, especially when you create a screensaver from the selected photos… and Picasa is a photo program!
What about the “my pictures slideshow premium?” This screensaver downsizes photos the same way. Also, this screensaver is horrible about cycling through photos. I have hundreds of photos in nested subfolders, yet the same photos get displayed over and over.
Matt, is this changed in current builds of Vista? Beta 2? 5472?
Thanks.
Rumor has it was fixed quite early in the cycle so it should be in beat 2.
One of the other small things I would love to see in a future vista update is a slideshow&Screensaver that ensures pictures are animated to avoid showing black bars down the sides. I realise this is because the photos are often in or near a 4:3 ratio but what with the target display 16:9 I just find it displeasing to the eye. I would love an option on the screensaver/slideshow to pan/zoom/crop to display avoiding the black bars.
I dont think cameras are going to change format in the near future and have considered batch cropping a duplicate of my photos to 16:9. anyway theres my 2 pence worth. cheers matt, really enjoy the blog
Matt,
Can we have a fix for Windows Media Center Edition 2005?
I was wondering about this, I still unfortunately use a SD TV, and when viewing pictures from our 4.0 megapixel camera, the TV never showed the entire photo. I had assumed before that the picture was resized dependent to the resolution MCE was set for.
Hallo Matt,
i am a german TV Journalist and I hope you can manage a fix for the wellknown problem of unsharp presented photos in MCE 2005.
I think its a small problem The Windows xp build in presenter does this
job much better than mce 2005.
I think the MCE Edition is a fine Software to present
slideshows very easy.
Is the problem still in Vista MCE and can I update to that version
Hopefully waiting and greetings
Wolfgang Tippelt
Will photo printing from the MCE interface still be subject to the same down-sampling?
In MCE2005, if you print a photo it gets printed at the same low res that it gets displayed in, making it necessary to drop out of the MCE interface and print direct from Windows Picture and Fax Viewer in order to obtain a high-quality print.
Mark
As a matter of fact,if MCE is 1024 resolution and you make the pictures 1024 resolution then the pictures still look like sh!t.
So that’s the native resolution of the displayed pictures when MCE is in 1024 or does MCE uses a special Microsoft algorithm to mess things up just to be sure?
Is there a way to get around this ridiculous limitation with MCE 2005? Please tell me I didn’t just waste $150 bucks for a flawed piece of software. All I do is show clients photos with MCE and if this huge limitation cannot be gotten around, I’ll be really upset.
…Mike
in Windows XP Professional Media Center and all Media Centers
there is a big problem where your readers like me need a valuable tip from you.
As medium to fast typer please go into MY Pictures, click left on one of several pictures (or files), press CTRL and hold, then click random on 6, 10 or more pictures (highlighting in order to do your next command copy) but before there are c a u s e d without asking sets of copies,
unwanted copies which confuse your files and can cause lots of problems. After this happens only in Media Center edition, it is a bug without a solution,
do you have a solution??
I did prove this to Future Shop and Staples, reported to HP and Microsoft, nobody came up with anything yet.
Please advise, thanks in advance
C.R.