PhotoTV HD mode brings out the detail in your holiday snapshots when displayed on a big Bravia LCD television.

If you've ever tried to run a photo slideshow on your television, you know that it usually looks pretty crappy. Sony was showing off PhotoTV HD mode to Australian journalists this week and it looked rather impressive, although I suspect the LG Scarlet it was pitted against would have made anything look good.

The Bravias feature USB ports, so it's easy to drag your photos onto a USB stick and view them on the television. PhotoTV HD processing is also applied to photos played on attached devices, as long as they're connected via HDMI. Sony also wants to turn its Bravias into the mother of all photo frames, with Picture Frame mode letting you display the one image from a USB device for up to four hours - as if monster televisions weren't already sucking enough juice. If your happy snaps aren't worthy of such treatment, there's also a handful of pre-installed images such as Van Gogh's Wheatfield with Cypresses.

Suburbanites never embrace new technologies as fast as technophiles think they will, but I think Mums n Dads are ready for PhotoTV HD mode. Even if they haven't embraced the digital photography revolution, chances are someone in the family has - such as new parents. When they bring over photos of bub on a CD or USB stick, it's not much of a leap to think "hey, these would look great on the big TV".

The downside of the digital photography revolution is that our photos remain hidden away on hard drives. Technologies such as PhotoTV HD will start to revive the idea of the slide night and actually bring families together around the television rather than have people scattered around the house on their own computers.