Reinventing the TV

I remember growing up, every Christmas my dad used to dust off the slide projector, the 8mm projector and pull out the big white screen and for the next hour or so (although for a 6 year old it felt like forever) we'd go through the past year's holiday slides and film clips. It was quite a production number.

Fast forward to the present day, we bought a new TV. We decided to reclaim some real estate in our living room by retiring our huge 34" CRT and replacing it with a 40" flat screen LED TV. At the time I bought it I didn't realize just how much this TV would become more than a TV. I was aware of the different functions but really, when you buy a TV all you think about is how clear and how big it is.

So it came as a big surprise to me when I plugged a hard drive into it and it would display all of my photos in glorious 40" splendor. Nothing to set-up, no white screen to put up, just plug and play.

All of a sudden my wife and I would sit down with my daughter and we'd show the pictures of the places we'd been to before she came along (at her age she's actually still interested). We'd put on some music and rummage through travel pics we took way back in 1998 and even go through some of the scanned pictures from my dad's library way back from the 1950's.

An added feature, since both my TV and my phone are made by Samsung, I can play back all the photos and videos and even music on my phone through the TV wirelessly through the All Share function.

So if you've been wanting to upgrade your TV or are looking at an excuse to upgrade look at the other connectivity functions, it's a great way to share all those terabytes of images from your hard drive before you lose them because of HD failure . . . .but that's a topic for another day.