My in-laws are very involved in the Horticultural society where they live, to the point that they travel around and give lectures and show presentations on the gardens they have grown, visited, and photographed.
They asked me (their tech support) if there was any way that they could take the images from their digital camera and display them on a screen for people in the audience to see easily. He is coming from a schoolteacher's background, so I think he's got something like an overhead fresnel-light projector in mind (having used one for many, many years - now retired). The only things that came to mind for me were:
1) You're gonna need a laptop. They don't have one right now, so that's probably going to run them $1000 all told.
2) Data projectors, such as those that my office has in the conference room, are not cheap. About another $1000 for one of those (purchased new) plus incredibly expensive bulbs to replace.
They're willing to buy a laptop (since they are in the market for a new computer anyway), but the price of the projector sort of stunned them, and I don't blame them; that seems like an awful lot of cash just to show pictures on a wall. Is there a method of doing this that I'm missing if you don't need uber-sharp pictures at super high speeds? Heck, I don't even think they need *moving* pictures... basically, I think he'd be happy if he could do a slide show from the .jpg files stored on his laptop.
This is definitely not my area of expertise, so I bring it to the people who are much more familiar with this sort of stuff. I'm more than willing to do my own research, I just don't even know where to start.
Thanks in advance.