Marty’s Camera Bag: Iomega FotoShow Adds Zip to Your Shoots
Must-See TV
Attaching the FotoShow to a TV and inserting a Zip disk launches the Image Center application on the TV screen. (A useless and annoying “demo” slideshow automatically starts every time, but fortunately it’s possible to delete it permanently.) Unfortunately, whether you insert a SmartMedia or CompactFlash card at this point or already have new images on the Zip disk from previous on-the-road downloads, it takes Image Center about 15 seconds per photo, on the average (depending on image file size), to update its catalog. For instance, it took more than 12 minutes to download each of my full 32MB CF cards.
Once your images are downloaded to the Zip disk and the firmware updates its contents, you’re ready to access the TV-screen application menus. This is done solely by remote control. A cleverly compact remote lets you view, edit, and present your photos with 15 buttons. In addition to the Power button there are: four directional arrows; A, B, and C buttons, whose functions vary according to the onscreen instructions; and Go and Back buttons for menu navigation. Three mode buttons — Edit, Album, and SlideShow — correspond to the FotoShow’s three modes of the same name. Additionally the Photo Grid button gives you for quick access to your image thumbnails, and the obligatory Help button does little more than tell you to read the manual, unfortunately.
You navigate images and image-editing functions solely using the FotoShow remote when working with image on a TV.
I was initially surprised to see what could be accomplished by the FotoShow Image Center without the use of a PC. Clever use of the A-B-C buttons lets you crop, rotate, and apply effects to your images; you can even remove red-eye. Then again, these features are somewhat limited. You can’t adjust contrast and brightness (though an AutoFix function attempts to balance the image for you.) Effects are limited to posterizing, duotoning, and converting an image to black and white or sepia tones. And saving any such changes to a high-resolution 3-megapixel image took more than a minute in my experience.
The greatest drawback to onscreen editing, though, is the fact that an image viewed on an analog TV screen will display marked differences in brightness and contrast to the same image displayed on a computer monitor. I found that the “autofixes” I had applied on the TV screen had to be undone with image editing software once I saw them on the PC.
Finally, while the FotoShow gets a lot of mileage out of the remote control’s few buttons, many processes are less than intuitive. Pressing the Slideshow button while viewing an album, for instance, doesn’t start a slideshow of that album; rather, it lets you build and save a new slideshow by importing individual images. And “back” doesn’t always mean go back: When editing, the Album button takes you back; when in Slide Show mode, the Back button doesn’t do anything at all. And when you’re copying photos, the onscreen instructions tell you to press C to mark the photos you want, when in reality pressing C unmarks the photos so they will not be copied. Even after two weeks with the FotoShow I still had trouble navigating.
Because It’s There
Interface snafus aside, I have to applaud Iomega for even making such operations possible on a basic TV set. While I would almost always choose to manipulate my images on a computer first, at the very least the FotoShow’s TV capabilities allow much more extensive on-the-spot slide shows than the typical digital camera alone, which can be handy whether you want to show images to grandma or a prospective client.
I wouldn’t go out and buy a device for the sole purpose of presenting droves of photos on a TV, but I would definitely invest in an external Zip drive for my PC, and by now a portable download solution for on-the-road photography is for me an absolute necessity. The fact that I can get all three of these things in the Iomega FotoShow Image Center for a mere $249.95 is a compelling reason to buy one.
This article was last modified on January 6, 2023
This article was first published on July 24, 2001
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