Sony Announces Digital Photo Album Device for Your HD Equipped Living Room

The Sony HDMS-S1D Digital Photo Album will store, organize, and show off your images on an HDTV. The $400 device has plenty of storage (80GB) and many methods to import your photos. You can create slideshows, organize images into albums, and output to CD, DVD, or memory card, all from the comfort of your couch. The HDMS-S1D will be available in October 2007.

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First and foremost, the S1D has an HDMI output, a component video output, S-video out, and composite video out. It also as audio out jacks on the back of the device.

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To get images into the device, it has slots to accept Memory Stick Standard/Duo, xD-Picture Card, SD, MMC, and Compact Flash media. You can also connect to the device via an Ethernet connection or plug in a USB device. A CD/DVD drive can also be used to import images off of optical drive media.

Once your images are in the S1D, you can organize to your heart's content. You can organize by date or by placing images into albums (up to 3000 different ones). You can also review, edit, rotate, delete and arrange photos for a slideshow or build scrapbook pages using Sony's x-Application software. A compatible printer can be hooked up to print photos or scrapbook pages.

To create slideshows, Sony has included the x -Pict Story HD software. You can choose from 30 pre-loaded sound tracks and transitions and you can also load up to 5 of your favorite songs from CD. The slideshow software can use Sony's face detection technology to tailor transitions around the faces in the image.

The x-ScrapBook application lets you use scrapbook templates and uses face detection and event clustering to group images together to make interesting layouts. Images with similar traits can be grouped - like photos of children, or photos from a particular event, like a vacation.

If the rest of the folks in your living room want copies of the images, you can save them out to CD, DVD, or to one of the flash memory card slots.

Now, we can see the S1D "in action"... Doesn't everyone's living room look like this?

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