Hi-def photos at a TV near you

Edvarcl Heng | Oct 26, 2007

In the US, Sony styles itself as a company with a DNA that's tightly woven with HD. So it's no surprise that it has stitched pictures into its HD family of products. Most of the Japanese firm's cameras include an HD output.

The HDMS-S1D Digital Photo Album is the hardware statement of all that needlework. Simply, it's an 80GB device to store, edit and output photo slideshows to a high-definition display.

Pictures can be loaded via memory cards, optical drives, USB or Ethernet. To figure out which picture goes where, there's an x-Pict Story HD software to handle the slideshow generation. It's pretty advanced stuff that does music upload and printouts as well, so there's no real need for a computer if you don't need one.

So what's the cool factor? This gadget utilizes a face detection engine to locate faces in a photograph and adjust slideshow transitions to match the placement of the faces. There's also an x-ScrapBook application that groups pictures based on event-clustering and common faces.

Altogether, this is a nifty device. But while HD is in its genes, the family tree is not extending to most parts of Asia. According to Sony Electronics Asia Pacific, the HDMS-S1D is available only in Japan and the US for now.