Digital Photography Hacks

Use Your Camera Phone as a Slideshow Viewer

Smartphone color displays are higher in quality than the pictures captured by their built-in cameras. But what if you could view your high-resolution digicam images on your Smartphone’s backlit display? You can!

We’ve established that camera phones don’t take the world’s best pictures. And they aren’t adept at close-ups, low-light photography, or anything that requires a zoom lens. The irony is that their high-resolution screens are quite good for displaying images, and they are many times bigger than the little LCD monitor on your regular digital camera. So when you’re on the go, why not use your Smartphone to show off the beautiful pictures you’ve just captured with your digicam?

With a little planning, there’s no reason why you can’t. Many Smartphones have memory-card slots that accept postage-stamp-sized Multi Media Cards (MMCs) and Secure Digital (SD) cards. These little cards are also popular with digital cameras.

I did a little testing with my Contax SL300R T* and a palmOne Treo 600 I had on loan. The Contax is a three-megapixel camera with a Carl Zeiss zoom lens; it captures beautiful images and stores them on an MMC or SD memory card. The Treo 600 includes a camera of its own, but the quality of the images leaves much to be desired. The 160 160-pixel CSTN backlit display, however, supports 4,096 colors and is truly brilliant. I was anxious to see how the images captured with the Carl Zeiss lens would look on the Treo.

First, I ...