Review: Resco Photo Viewer 6. The Best Just Got Better

Posted by: dgoldring on Dec 18 2006

 

I love digital photography.  Taking photos with my Canon digital camera, manipulating the images on my computer…Frankly, it is amazing what you can do with some good photo editing tools.  Mostly, though, I like to do typical darkroom-type tasks such as enlarging, shrinking, cropping, fixing the colors and eliminating red eye.  When I got my Axim, one of my goals was to be able to do the same kind of image manipulation with my Axim that I can do on my desktop.  This proved to be no easy task.  I tested virtually every picture and image viewer on the market before finally settling on Resco Photo Viewer and I have not looked back.  When I started using Resco Photo Viewer, I found exactly the powerful tool I had been seeking.  It allowed me to manipulate and edit images on my Pocket PC with ease.  With that in mind, I recently downloaded Resco’s latest release of this amazing program, Resco Photo Viewer 6; excited to find that the best had been made even better.

Installation and Registration: Resco Photo Viewer comes packed with a variety of programs and tools which makes it a fairly large file.  Download the file to your desktop and install it via ActiveSync.  Once installed, you will have 14 days to register the program. 

Views: The main screen of Photo Viewer allows you to view all of the photos in a particular folder and manipulate, view, and edit them.  There are four basic views: thumbnail, small tile, large tile, and detail.  Thumbnail will display the most images at a time, while detail provides file and format information about each image.  From here, you can select the pictures you wish to view, edit or manipulate. 

Slideshow: Sometime you just want to enjoy a leisurely stroll down memory lane.  Take a look at pictures of the kids when they were not acting like destructive little monsters.  Resco Photo Viewer includes a slide show feature.  From the main screen, just select the pictures you wish to view, set the interval time and let your Pocket PC do all of the work for you.  You can even add your favorite music in the background.  Now, sit down, relax, and look at these great pictures of Uncle Stan’s forehead.  Sorry, although Resco Photo Viewer makes it incredibly easy to view your pictures, it will not help you take better photos. 

Editing Tools: While Resco Photo Viewer makes it incredibly easy to view photos, one of its main attractions is its ability to edit and manipulate photos.  To this end, it offers a number of useful and effective tools.   Resco Photo Viewer gives you complete control over the contrast, brightness and gamma values of each photo.  Just use the sliders to set the values for each function.  Additionally, for a little added fun, click "Make Negative" to create a negative image of your picture.  In fact, the only editing tool that was not available in Resco Photo Viewer is a redeye filter.  I’ll be honest here and tell you that redeye is a huge problem in many of my photos.  So, the ability to easily edit out red eye is an important feature. 

Drawing Tools: Resco Photo Viewer also offers a number of tools to add graphics to your photos.  Select the circle or square icons to draw a shape within your picture.  Fill it with any color and you are ready to go.  This is a perfect tool for creating a text area or for overlaying pictures on top of one another.

To draw freehand, just select the pencil icon.  Choose a tip size and color and add any characters or drawings you want.  This is ideal for writing notes on an image or marking up a picture for a presentation.

Captions: You can add notes or captions to any photo easily by using the text box tool.  For added customization, the text box allows you to modify the font, size, placement, and orientation of the text.

Notes: Sometimes you need a little extra infromation about a photo.  This is where photo notes comes in handy.  This allows you to write down any background information, names, dates, or places, necessary to properly identify your picture.

Zoom and Rotate: In addition to the editing and drawing tools, you can also manipulate the way the image is displayed.  Use the zoom tool to size the display  from 25% to 300%.  Making the image larger helps considerably with the editing tools when you want to focus on a small portion of the image.

You can also rotate the image either left or right.  I have used this feature frequently when I have a horizontal photo that I want to display vertically as my wallpaper (incidentally, you can save any image as your wallpaper background). 

Finally, use the cropping tool to cut away any excess or unwanted portions of a picture.  Just highlight the portion you want to save with the cropping tool and the rest will be cut away.  This is one of the most important tools you can use when editing and manipulating photos.

Sending Photos: Once you are finished manipulating and editing your images, it is time to send them.  Resco Photo Viewer can automatically send any image or album through Bluetooth, the Infra-red beaming port, or email (selecting send by email will automatically open into your default email program such as Flexmail).  Just select send to, choose the mode through which you want to send the image, and sit back and wait for the compliments about how cute your kids are.

Video: One of the new features Resco has added in version 6 is the ability to view video images within Resco Photo Viewer.  Play any MPEG 1 formatted video clips (the format used by most video CD’s) directly within Resco Photo Viewer, without the need for a separate video player on your Pocket PC. 

Screen Capture Utility: In addition to Photo Viewer, Resco also includes a screen capture utility in the package.  There are many screen capture utilities out there ranging from freeware to expensive packages.  Resco’s utility is one of the best.  Select whether to snap an image of the screen as it appears, or wait 10 seconds so you can set the image you want on the screen.  Once it snaps, the picture will automatically save and open in Resco Photo Viewer so you can edit or manipulate the image if necessary.

Desktop Album Generator Utility: This is another extremely useful tool Resco includes in its package.  Pictures which are optimized to be viewed on your desktop, may not display properly on your Pocket PC.  The Album Generator Utility allows you to edit and manipulate any of your photos and save them as individual photos or albums.  You can then save them directly to your Pocket PC.  When the album generator utility saves images or albums to your Pocket PC, it automatically modifies the images to optimize the display for your Pocket PC. 

Price: Normally Resco Photo Viewer costs $24.95.  If you purchased it within the last year, however, all upgrades are free.  If you purchased it less than two years ago, the upgrade is 50% off.  This is a fantastic upgrade policy which is sure to lend itself to a great deal of customer satisfaction as future upgrades continue to be released.

Additionally, Resco Photo Viewer can also be purchased at a discount as part of a Resco package.  First, it can be purchased as part of the Resco Utility Package (above left).  In addition to Resco Photo Viewer, this package also includes Resco Explorer (including Resco Registry Editor), and Resco Keyboard Pro.  The Resco Media Suite (above right) includes Resco Photo Viewer, Resco Audio Recorder, and Resco Radio, and Resco Explorer (including Resco Registry Editor).

 Conclusion: Calling this program a photo viewer is almost an insult to the developers behind it.  The photo viewer is only one component of this vast and powerful tool.  It includes more opportunities to manipulate photos (editing, drawing, cropping) that any other program available today.  In fact, it is so feature rich, that I am sure I missed some in this review (for that I will apologize to Resco).  Simply put, this package offers the best tools for manipulating, viewing and editing photos on your Pocket PC.  As if that weren’t enough, it also includes the screen capture and the desktop album generator.  This program could easily have been titled "The Resco Photo, Image and Video Viewer Editor, Including Screen Capture and Album Generator Utilities."  That must have been a little long, though.  So, we will resort to calling it the grossly inadequate Resco Photo Viewer, the best photo and image program available for the Pocket PC, and getting better with every release.

Vital Statistics:

Name: Resco Photo Viewer

Version: 6.01

Platform: WM 2003 SE

Also Available: WM5, Syrian, Smartphone, Palm

Developer: Resco

Available From:    Resco

                             JAMM Store

Price: $24.95

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