Audio/video out... explain?

[KandieMan]

Hi, in looking at the canon s400 I noticed it had AV out... well i know it plugs into your TV, but what exactly do you then see on your TV?

Would it be possible for someone to take a picture of their TV with it connected or something, or somehow help me understand exactly how connecting it to your TV works/is benefical/functionality

Thanks!

[boogar]

It shows whatever's on your LCD. Good for scrolling through in playback mode and displaying images/movies for people to see. I took a bunch of phots at Thanksgiving and at the end of the day I hooked the camera up to the bigscreen. Everybody got a real kick out of seeing the kids making goofy faces and so on.

[KandieMan]

Is it at all possible for you to take a picture of how it looks on your TV with another camera or something?

Do the pictures that are displayed on the TV come out better/worse/same than on the LCD?

[steve]

Originally Posted by KandieMan

Is it at all possible for you to take a picture of how it looks on your TV with another camera or something?

Do the pictures that are displayed on the TV come out better/worse/same than on the LCD?

They come out much bigger

Seriously, they look as good on my 42-inch plasma screen as they do on the camera's LCD - sometimes they look better.

-Steve

[KandieMan]

Would you consider it a good feature to have? I can think of it being quite nice especially with this upcoming christmas to just load pictures up on TV at the end for everyone to see.
I have a 51"... the pictures wouldn't be displayed "too big" would they?

[Alan T]

Originally Posted by KandieMan

help me understand exactly how connecting to your TV works/is benefical/functionality

You can take a digicam picture of anything you like and show it to any audience with a TV. This means you can show your pictures to people who don't have a computer, e.g., elderly relatives, without the hassle and expense of printing them.

You can also use a wonderful bit of software called TVWriter from www.satsignal.net, which takes ANY jpeg and converts it to a suitable size, format, and naming convention, ready to write on to your camera's memory card.

If your camera has a TV output, you can then inflict your life's work, sales presentation, political platform, holiday snaps., etc., complete with captions, on any poor unsuspecting captive audience that owns a telly. Your digicam becomes a poor man's laptop+computer projector, or poor man's computer+state-of-the-art lecture theatre.

You can also make videotape slideshows, with a commentary, and then you have a poor man's still image camcorder. You can post the videotapes to anyone with a VCR and a TV. You can do the equivalent of a slide show, and you don't even have to be there.

[Oleg]

Since TV shows what's on your LCD, you can connect camera to VCR and easily tape silent video - or, record video on your camera first, switch it to playback mode, and then tape it on VCR. Some people say you can use your camera as a webcam, if your computer videocard has AV input.

Thanks for the link, Alan. Looks like a cool program. I wonder if it can be the answer to those who had problems uploading images back to their cameras.

[Alan T]

Originally Posted by Oleg

Thanks for the link, Alan. Looks like a cool program. I wonder if it can be the answer to those who had problems uploading images back to their cameras.

TVWriter writes files suitable for several different makes of digicam, none of which were the ones I possessed. However, it worked fine on my Olympus and Casio.

What is necessary when writing files back to the camera is to put them back in a suitable file structure, or the camera won't find them. I fixed this by taking a single camera shot on an empty, camera-formatted memory card, and then writing the TVWriter files alongside it in the same directory.

[iason]

I use the feature a lot, but as my father says, it can never take place of his slide projector and its ambience.. Honestly, i am agree with him.

Anyway, it was a "must" for me before purchase, and it's now a great pleasure for me and those who can't watch TV and have to look at your masterpieces (!) while you are showing your albums to them