Digital Home Thoughts: The DVX-POD: Great Idea, Poor Execution

Photo Viewing
Given the superb screen on the DVX-POD, you’d think it would make an ideal photo viewer, right? Not exactly. Given the size of the unit, the fact that it lacks a CompactFlash or Secure Digital memory card slot is unforgivable. If it had such a slot, it would be a valuable proofing tool for photo shoots, but as it stands it's only good for viewing them. Once you do get images loaded onto the DVX-POD from your PC, the screen lives up to it’s promise: photos look excellent. The contrast seemed a bit high, images tended to look a touch too saturated, but it was a subtle effect.


Figure 9: A four megapixel image displayed on a non-HD TV set. The image quality is quite good.

It’s unfortunate that there was no portrait mode for images – everything is forced into landscape viewing. The slide show function is boring: there are no transitions, no pan/zoom effects. On the plus side, the anti-aliasing on shrinking of JPEG images is excellent – I couldn’t see any ill-effects of shrinking large (4 MP) images. If you can figure out the obscure MyList function (mentioned earlier) you’ll have music play behind your slide show – whether you want it or not. There’s no way to start the slide show without music. Pressing the stop button during the slide show caused the audio playback to stutter and repeat for several seconds.

There’s also no way to chose a different song or playlist for the slide show – it’s whatever you have in the MyList. I tried to open a 1500 x 1200 BMP file, and the music sputtered while the file refused to load. I tried again with a 1020 x 1000 GIF file – the image loaded, but it was distorted. A 1600 x 1200 JPEG image loaded cleanly in one second, while 640 x 480 resolution JPEGs loaded instantly.