photographs

[grandem]

I have downloaded my holiday snaps on to my computer and I want to put them on to a disc to show through my widescreen TV (Sony Bravia 32") without any distortion. What size do I crop them ? The photos are approximately 6"x4.5" before doing anything to them.

[Milvus]

There are too many variables to give an definite answer. The size to which you could take your photo depends on the size of the picture (in Megabytes) and the size of the sensor (CCD) which recorded it. If you have and modern point and shoot then a photo of 8 x 10 inches should be OK, if you have a full blown DSLR, they carry larger CCD's and larger pixel counts and produce images that can be taken larger than 8 x 10. TV screens aren't particularly good quality reproducers of photos so there will always be some degradation against the quality of a printed photo. In short try a few different options of the same photo an see which looks best on your TV

[Buenchico]

While everything Milvus states is correct, I'm not sure that it actually answers your question!

The screen aspect ratio of your TV is 16:9. If you want to crop your photos to the same ratio (so that they'll fill the whole screen without distortion), you'll need to keep the width as 6" while cropping the height down to about 3.4". (It should actually be 3.375" but that's greater accuracy than you'll need). Of course you can crop further as long as you retain the same aspect ratio. (e.g. 4" x 2¼" is still a 16:9 ratio).

Chris

[Skids]

The normal aspect ratio of a widescreen TV is 16:9 (the ratio is 16/9=1.778). Currently your photo ratio is 6/4.5=1.334 (which is the non-widescreen TV aspect ratio of 4:3). You only need to crop the height. 6/1.778=3.375 so the new size is 6"x3.375".
However, if you're not printing the pictures, measuring in inches is pretty much irrelevant. Ideally you want to work in pixels as opposed to inches, so if your photos are 1024pixels by 768pixels (4:3) your new size would be 1024 by 576 (1024/1.778=576).
Incidentally, 5x3 (10x6, etc) is the closest standard picture frame size to widescreen (5/3=1.667).

[grandem]

Thanks for your answers, will give it a go !

[TTG]

No need to crop...just select 4:3 picture size on your tv.