Projecting digital images

[Alex_B]

OK, here is the story. Having been a slide person for almost 2 decades I quite like projecting my images in slide shows on a large screen.

Until recently I usually was a bit disappointed in terms of colour, contrast and in particular sharpness. This has changed yesterday when I connected my laptop to a Panasonic PT AX 100 E 16:9 projector.
The first few tries looked just like I was used to. But then I realised what does the trick:

- Set your graphics card signal to exactly the projectors native resolution (in my case 1280x720 )
- scale your images such that they will either fill width or height in that resolution (in my case scaling portrait and square images to 720 pixels height, and landscape and panoramic images to 1280 pixels width)
- apply a weak resharpening
- slightly push contrast

The outcome in a 5 meter wide projection was just great with respect to colour and sharpness. Not quite as when I project slides, but very close to it. I did not expect this at all. Even portrait images, which then would only be 720 pixels in height, came out very nice.

Only black and white suffers considerably from contrast and dynamic range issues.

Probably lots of you already knew how to do it, but I am just so happy now that I found out how it works So I am sorry for telling public knowledge as if it was the discovery of America Also, it probably works with any other half-decent projector.


So, since now I am into projecting again.. what software do you guys use for laptop slide shows? I'd like a software which allows defined output to the projector, allowing fine tuning of resolution, contrast, colour and brightness. Soft transitions should be possible, maybe also a sound track. and it needs to be interactive (needs to allow to stop at certain images interactively, not just a movie).

 

[Alex_B]

anyone wants to help??

 

[Overread]

the only software that I know of is powerpoint, and I have no idea if it can do what you specify (it might though windows products often have many features that hte layman never uses)

 

[Alex_B]

Thanks for the reply!

But no, ppt won't do the job I need done. I give about one ppt presentation every two weeks.

You can certainly use it to do a slide presentation, but with respects to features it is not the right thing.


I thought more along the lines of wings platinum, but maybe a bit less expensive .. and I would not need all the features of that pro package

 

[lostprophet]

pics2exe is pretty good

and proshow gold is used a lot around the camera club scene

if you remember that slideshow I sent you, well that was done on pics2exe

 

[Alex_B]

thanks ! Yes, I remember that slideshow Will have a look.

 

[Alex_B]

and proshow gold is used a lot around the camera club scene

but that link is rather dead ... so their webpage is probably down

 

[lostprophet]

its working fine for me

 

[Alex_B]

works now! must have been just a 2 hr problem with that webpage