xbox 360 photos are superior

At least for me, the xbox 360 is displaying my digital photos in noticeably higher quality than my S3 (as in noticeable, not drastic). I have Photo 2.0 enabled. These are 8 megapixels photos on a 50" plasma. The 360 photos are simply stunning and I can walk right up to the screen and see no pixelation at all. The S3 clearly lacks color depth from a normal viewing range, and blockiness is evident as you get closer. Is there anyway to boost the quality or some config option I may have overlooked?

Also, the 360 and S3 display the images at exactly the same size with each leaving some left/right border even on a landscape image. The gray TiVo background is surprisingly distracting (perhaps just when compared to the deep black of the 360). Anyway to change this?

The 360 has some other nice little touches, but ultimately I may go with the TiVo anyway: wife knows how to use it; always on; uses the same remote instead of a controller. Just seems like the system could use some polish and improve the picture quality (if my config is correct anyway).

Any help appreciated, thanks!
-Nuttzy

 

I think there's certainly more tweaking I should try on my side. However, my TV is saying that each input has the same 1280x720 resolution. This makes me think that there is some degradation on the S3 side.

If you don't mind my asking, how many megapixels are the photos and what size TV screen is used in your comparison?

Thanks!
-Nuttzy

BTW: the combo of stunning quality, ability to combine subfolders into a slideshow, better slide show effects, and generally more responsive operation has me leaning towards the 360.

 

I don't really see the delay as much of a problem, though it does exist. I tend to not cycle quickly through the photos, but instead just let the slideshow recurse the directory structure, randomly picking from thousands of photos. I think it's like 5 seconds between photos which is almost always enough time to grab the next one. I'm happy enough with the performance, but it would be nice if it were a little snappier when I tried to cycle through them manually.

I've not done anything towards optimizing performance but may considered doing so. My pics are anywhere from 2.5Mb to 4Mb each. I'm serving from my laptop and while I don't know the hard drive specs, I'm sure it is far short of a 10,000 RPM drive. I'm on an old 802.11b 11Mbs wireless router. So there is certainly room for improvement here. Memory doesn't seem to be an issue. I noticed the laptop gets hotter than I've ever felt it, probably from constant reading from the drive. I would think the drive is probably the bottleneck, and not CPU, memory, or network. Haven't really analyzed it though.

I do hope TiVo will continue to improve this feature. xbox 360 is the clear winner right now for it's ability to recurse subdirectories and for having a deep black background. I figure it does better quality b/c the pics do require resizing to fit the screen, and I'm sure the 360 graphics processor blows away anything the TiVo has for such manipulation.

Lot of room for improvement, so come on TiVo, I'm routing for ya!

-Nuttzy

 

Sorry, all that typing and I didn't answer your question. I don't know if the TiVo serves them faster, it seemed about the same. There certainly was not enough benefit to overcome other shortcomings. And if my disk is the bottleneck, then it probably doesn't make a difference which unit I'm using.

-Nuttzy