It certainly makes sense to do this if you're showing off your pictures to many friends or family members. You wouldn't want your guests to crowd around that crummy computer screen would you?

Well, there are many ways to display photos on TV. Let's step through the various options in this article.

The most basic way to display digital photos on TV is through your digital camera. Most models, if not all come equipped with a video-out cable. All you do is connect one end of the cable to the video-out plug of the camera and the other end into the video-in plug of the TV. That's all there is to it. Now just playback the pictures on the camera and they will display on the TV.

The drawback of this approach, of course, is that you can only show the photos available on the memory card within the camera. So if you only have a 32MB memory card installed, then you probably show very few pictures.

Another method is to use a photo viewing device. The SanDisk Digital Photo Viewer is one such device. This neat little gadget sits on top of your TV set and it accepts popular memory cards like CompactFlash, MultiMedia, Secure Digital, SmartMedia and MemoryStick as input. There is a video-out port to connect the device to the TV. Compare it to using a digital version of a 35mm slide projector, so to speak.

I've also noticed some DVD players coming out in the market which accept memory cards as input. One of these is the Sampo DVE-631CF. It's a reasonably priced DVD player which also allows you to play back MP3s and JPEGs from both CD-R/RW and CompactFlash Type I cards.

Still, whichever of the above options you use, you are still limited by the memory on your memory card. Again, a small capacity memory cardfewer pictures to display in a presentation.

The best approach of all, in my opinion, is to convert your digital photos to DVD format. The DVD you create can then be played back in any DVD player to display all your pictures as a slideshow. The chief advantage of this approach over the others is that you can store many, many photos on a 4GB DVD-R. It's also pretty convenient to send a DVD of pictures (instead of a memory card) to your friends or family members who live faraway.

All you need is a DVD burner and some special software. The best software I've found for doing this is Ulead CD and DVD PictureShow.

This software is user friendly and allows you to convert all of your digital photos to DVD in a few easy steps. You can even insert special effects to your photo slideshow, including transitions, music and DVD menus. You can find a full set of tutorials at the Ulead website to guide you if needed.

The software burns them into a DVD-R for you once you've converted them to DVD format. Then simply pop the DVD into any DVD player and play back your picture slideshow.

Now you have three options available to you for displaying your photos on your TV. If you are wanting to show off your collection to many guests, displaying them on your TV makes sense. The method you choose it up to you, but remember that for the best showcasing possibilities, the convert to DVD format is best. Have fun and get out the popcorn!