As any Macolyte could already tell you, the installation was almost completely automatic, and the Mac-formatted iPod turned into a Windows-formatted one in minutes. That isn't to say automatic always means good. A nice advantage of using the iPod Photo with Windows software is that it's very easy to synch plain old folders full of pictures (as opposed to specifically designated photo archives). However, when I set it up, it defaulted to the My Pictures folder and all its contents, which in my case meant upwards of 7,000 shots. I had to let it do a lot of churning before I could tell it that I didn't, in fact, want 7,000 pictures, and that from now on it should only synch photos from certain folders—and keep them separate, listed by folder name. On a Windows PC, you can also synch collections from Photoshop Album 2.0 or the all-new Photoshop Elements 3.0. On the Mac, you synch iPhoto albums.

Having made peace with photo synching, I took the iPod down to the TV room to see how good it looked on a high-definition screen, in this case a Hitachi plasma. I connected the iPod to the TV using both the standard composite video (that'd be the yellow plug coming from the AV output) as well as the S-Video jack, and I could see a big difference. If you're looking at photos on an HDTV, be sure to go with S-Video, because the colors are more accurate and the TV stretches it to fit the screen with less image distortion. (If you're connecting to a standard TV set, there's a chance you don't have an S-Video option, not to mention the distinct possibility you won't be able to tell the difference between the two if there is.) Compared to even HD-compatible DVD players reading images from a CD, the quality of the iPod Photo's video slideshows is excellent.

Watching slideshows on TV with music can be fun, mesmerizing with the right combination of vision and sound. The trick is to build special playlists that correspond to your photo folders (you can use the On-The-Go feature, or select music ahead of time in iPhoto). Pre-planning is key since you can't pull up particular songs or albums while you browse photos, and you can't skip to the next song once the slideshow is going.

As you've probably already guessed (or read in other iPod Photo reviews), the $500 sticker price is a little high for a color-screen MP3 player that doesn't do movies. I guess in the end it's hard to place the iPod Photo. It does what it's supposed to do, and does it well. Does it do what it's supposed to do? Yes, and it does it well. Is it something you need—or even want? That's a tougher question to answer.