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MS TV Photo Viewer - Brand New - $19.99 shipped

H

Humphh

Member
So I get this spam email trying to sell me the Microsoft TV Photo Viewer with Remote Control for $29.99 from State Street Direct Online. I've seen this before and know it's not worth the $100+ they originally wanted. MS makes some decent hardware products so it peaked my interest.

I want the Iomega Fotoshow but that's still over $100. No good. This will be for my technically challenged relatives so it has to be cheap and easy.

Went over to eBay and saw Tiger Direct selling it for $19.99. Not bad! This is $10 less than what they're charging on their own website. I watch this item and decide to come back to it later. They still want $5.95 for shipping. Takes me over that $20 "what the heck, I spend more on dinner" limit.

For the fun of it, I go over to Half.com. Guess what? Tiger Direct is selling there as well for $19.99 and this time, free shipping! Free shipping good, ahhh, doonuuutttt..... (vague Simpson reference)

C'mon guys. Go ahead and bring on the Anandtech effect. I only bought one. For this price I might buy another if all of you don't clean them out before I get back to it.


Linky
 
1.44 MB floppy drive? That will hold exacly one high resolution image, maybe two. Also uses RCA composite instead of SVHS connection. I guess I could live with the video connection, but a floppy drive? What were they thinking?
 
Why do you think you can get them for 20 dollars now 😉

They should make one that reads CD's so you can burn a whole image collection on there and be able to go through it nicely with a good gui or something. THat would be nice. A floppy as you said ... not so nice, but for 20 dollars it might make a cheap present for my mom 😉
 
You're only viewing on a TV via a composite cable. Over 640x480 is overkill. You should be able to fit 25-30 pictures at that resolution on a single floppy.
 
The thing to remember - $20! Consider this a low tech solution for your low tech friends and relatives. You can fit between 20-40 pictures on a floppy disk using their software. From reviews I've read, it looks good on TV. Forget 3 megapixel pictures. For TV viewing you only need 640x480.

I still have my digital camera, laptop, digital photo frame, etc. for higher tech (and more complex) viewing. The Photo viewer uses a power cord and a composite cord - no muss, no fuss.
 
Originally posted by: TechDreamer1.44 MB floppy drive? That will hold exacly one high resolution image, maybe two. Also uses RCA composite instead of SVHS connection. I guess I could live with the video connection, but a floppy drive? What were they thinking?
Click to expand...

You're not going to put unedited images from your 5MP digital camera on a disk...you're going to resize the pictures to (at most) 640x480 and apply tons of compression...something like "cjpeg -Q 40 foo.bmp >foo.jpg" to squeeze images down to 10-20K each. At that size, you can fit a fair number of pictures on one floppy, and they'll have as much detail as will be visible on a TV.
 
You're not thinking 4th dimensionally! 😉

If you happen to own one of those floppy adapters for MMC or Smartmedia, then you could hold 128MB or more!

Not a great deal if you have to go out and buy one, but if you've got one already, it could be pretty sweet!

 
Originally posted by: BeaverBob
You're not thinking 4th dimensionally! 😉

If you happen to own one of those floppy adapters for MMC or Smartmedia, then you could hold 128MB or more!

Not a great deal if you have to go out and buy one, but if you've got one already, it could be pretty sweet!
Click to expand...


Great idea for turning an otherwise useless device a little useful.
 
If you happen to own one of those floppy adapters for MMC or Smartmedia, then you could hold 128MB or more!
Click to expand...
I thought the computer needed special drivers to use those adapters. Not sure they would work in a standalone device like that.
 
Wow. The extra 5 dollars did the trick for me. I got it for my mom for christmas, I bet she'd enjoy putting random embarrasing baby pictures of me on floppies and showing everyone 😉 lol she'll enjoy it
 
the $5.00 off sealed the deal for me too. This will be great when I travel to visit family for Christmas....and I don't have to worry about it getting broken because it is so cheap.
 
So I talk trash about this thing and then I order one... You guys convinced me that it would be a good Christmas gift, plus I can give away my useless floppy disks. I didn't realize that the compressed pictures could look good. The fifteen delivered clinched the deal. Thanks for the post.
 
Another "thanks" response.

The 5 off 10 deal required a new account. Now my wife has an account on e-bay. She's not thrilled. If you make an account make sure you go back after being distracted about free magazines and un-check all that BS about how much you want their spam... the defaults are set to mail you a bunch of crap.
 
I also had to join E-Bay to get this deal, thanks for the advice to check the spam settings. E-Bay has the worst default spam settings I have ever seen!
 
Originally posted by: Humphh
So I get this spam email trying to sell me the Microsoft TV Photo Viewer with Remote Control for $29.99 from State Street Direct Online. I've seen this before and know it's not worth the $100+ they originally wanted. MS makes some decent hardware products so it peaked my interest.

I want the Iomega Fotoshow but that's still over $100. No good. This will be for my technically challenged relatives so it has to be cheap and easy.

Went over to eBay and saw Tiger Direct selling it for $19.99. Not bad! This is $10 less than what they're charging on their own website. I watch this item and decide to come back to it later. They still want $5.95 for shipping. Takes me over that $20 "what the heck, I spend more on dinner" limit.

For the fun of it, I go over to Half.com. Guess what? Tiger Direct is selling there as well for $19.99 and this time, free shipping! Free shipping good, ahhh, doonuuutttt..... (vague Simpson reference)

C'mon guys. Go ahead and bring on the Anandtech effect. I only bought one. For this price I might buy another if all of you don't clean them out before I get back to it.


Linky
Click to expand...






You sound like you work for them, Do you????

 
what a useless device. You guys can just burn jpg images as vcd slideshow and wouldn't have to spend $20 on this worthless piece of junk.
 
Originally posted by: .paldo
what a useless device. You guys can just burn jpg images as vcd slideshow and wouldn't have to spend $20 on this worthless piece of junk.
Click to expand...

correction: $14.99 on this nice "gift".
 
Originally posted by: gadgetboy
If you happen to own one of those floppy adapters for MMC or Smartmedia, then you could hold 128MB or more!
Click to expand...
I thought the computer needed special drivers to use those adapters. Not sure they would work in a standalone device like that.
Click to expand...

Yep, you are correct! You need drivers for those smartmedia adapters to work, which this won't...
 
Originally posted by: Humphh
The thing to remember - $20! Consider this a low tech solution for your low tech friends and relatives. You can fit between 20-40 pictures on a floppy disk using their software. From reviews I've read, it looks good on TV. Forget 3 megapixel pictures. For TV viewing you only need 640x480.

I still have my digital camera, laptop, digital photo frame, etc. for higher tech (and more complex) viewing. The Photo viewer uses a power cord and a composite cord - no muss, no fuss.
Click to expand...

Even that's overkill. A NTSC TV (US TV) displays in 352x240, so 320x240 should do it. Still, you have to go through the trouble of making special sized pics just for this. At that res, you should be able to fit 60-70 pictures on a floppy.

 
Originally posted by: Fritzo
Originally posted by: Humphh
The thing to remember - $20! Consider this a low tech solution for your low tech friends and relatives. You can fit between 20-40 pictures on a floppy disk using their software. From reviews I've read, it looks good on TV. Forget 3 megapixel pictures. For TV viewing you only need 640x480.

I still have my digital camera, laptop, digital photo frame, etc. for higher tech (and more complex) viewing. The Photo viewer uses a power cord and a composite cord - no muss, no fuss.
Click to expand...

Even that's overkill. A NTSC TV (US TV) displays in 352x240, so 320x240 should do it. Still, you have to go through the trouble of making special sized pics just for this. At that res, you should be able to fit 60-70 pictures on a floppy.
Click to expand...


No. ~480 scan lines are visible on screen on NTSC video. If you cut your images down to 320x240, you're throwing out half the detail that can be seen. Standard NTSC video can display at least 340x480 in real resolution (i.e. not including overscan). Having an image in higher resolution can actually work better since the device can downsample the image and the blurred effect will look better than a chopped down resolution image. You can see the same effect by scanning something in at 75dpi on a scanner and comparing it to something scanned at 300dpi, then downsampled to 75dpi.
 
From the Microsoft website:

The TV Photo Viewer software makes copies of the pictures you choose and resizes the them to a 640 x 480 resolution, optimizing the size, shape and color depth for your TV. The software also compresses the picture copies so that you can fit up to 40 pictures on a floppy disk or in a single e-mail message. The TV Photo Viewer software does not change the original pictures in any way, so you can continue to use the originals for other purposes.

All pictures are converted to .jpg format when you save them onto a floppy disk using the TV Photo Viewer software.

To use Microsoft TV Photo Viewer, you need NTSC Television with composite (RCA-style) video input. Televisions without composite video input that have a coaxial input require a powered RF modulator (not included).
 
Ordered one as a gift. Tigerdirect still has them for $19.99 at half.com with free shipping. I assume one of these would be able to read the floppy disks created with a Sony Mavica.
 
Glad to see this thread still going. And in response to one of the earlier replies - No, I don't work for the company.

Just got two of them in the mail yesterday. One for my dad, one for my aunt. It will be very easy to mail them floppy disks.
 
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