Sony Puts Your Digital Snaps on TV

A new line of Cyber-shot digital cameras can sync with high-definition TVs for terrific image quality in your living room

by Kenji Hall

Editor's Rating:

The Good: Image quality on high-definition TV is fabulous

The Bad: High-definition TVs aren't widely available and are expensive

The Bottom Line: For photography buffs and tourists alike, this is a fun application for digital imaging

Reader Reviews

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I've found it harder than ever to get excited about digital cameras. Call me jaded, but it seems s if every few weeks a maker comes out with yet another new model promising even higher-resolution photos than the last.

Sure, these increasingly ultra-thin, point-and-shoot models are wonderfully designed and pack ever more megapixel capacity. But when it comes to image quality, can anyone really tell the difference?

Probably not. While camera makers talk about pixels and picture quality interchangeably, experts will tell you that contrast ratio (the difference between the blackest blacks and the whitest whites) and color saturation (which measures how faithfully the digital dots, or pixels, reproduce in-between hues) are just as important, if not more so.

Leader of the Pack?

That's why a new feature in Sony's (SNE) Cyber-shot cameras is such a welcome shift away from the pixel-centric rhetoric. It's called "high-definition output" in geek-speak. In plain English, it means that when you plug your camera into a high-definition TV, your photos appear in the satisfyingly sharp resolution in which they were shot.

It might sound like a baby step for camera technology, but this is just the kind of cool feature that could set Sony apart from the pack. The company is demonstrating that software can lead to useful synergies between products and raise the profile of TVs over PCs in the digital home. It also puts point-and-shoot cameras in a different league from cell-phone cameras, which are a growing threat at 3 megapixels to 5 megapixels.

Finally, there's something to all this talk of digital convergence—a world where all gizmos communicate freely with each other—that photography buffs and soccer parents alike can appreciate. In the past, you might have replayed high-definition videos on a top-of-the-line LCD or plasma screen but wondered why still images projected onto the same screen—especially when zooming in on finely textured surfaces—appeared fuzzy.

Ready for Its Close-Up

It wasn't that your pictures weren't detailed enough. Quite the contrary, any digital camera now on the market has a high enough resolution to view on the best of the full 1080 progressive (1080p) high-definition TV screens.

Two megapixel cameras are all you need to get the same picture quality as you do on your high-end flat-panel TV. The problem was, still cameras weren't equipped to beam a high-definition digital signal to your TV. To see your photos in detail, your best bet was usually to print them.

Enter Sony. For a Feb. 28 Cyber-shot press event, the company placed a half dozen of its own 40-in. to 52-in. Bravia liquid-crystal-display TVs around a room and set a slide show on a continuous loop. I didn't expect much, but Sony surprised me. The pictures taken with the slim and stylish T100 showed up in wondrous detail.

They were mainly of the indigenous flora in Hawaii: a close-up of water droplets on a leaf, an exotic brush-like plant set against a blue sky, grey-green fern fading into a morning mist. Sony credits the Bionz chip, which controls image processing and color and is standard hardware in the company's single-reflex lens cameras.

The result: Instead of showing the bright but limited color gradient that can produce flat photos and has been a major drawback of digital imaging, these pictures looked far more natural than anything I've witnessed so far.

Your Face is Familiar

That's difficult for a film shutterbug like me to admit. And being a cynic as well, I suspected that these photos might have been edited and confronted the photographer, Kazuyoshi Miyoshi, to find out if he had touched them up. No, he said, the pictures were as he had shot them.

The T100—a featherweight less than a half-inch thick that shoots up to 8 megapixels, comes with face-recognition technology, targets the party crowd, and is expected to sell for $400—isn't the only model that does high-def photos on TV.