These days, sending friends and relatives to sleep has become something of an art form. No longer do you get out a simple photo album or the old slide projector to show off your holiday snaps. Now you can use your PC to burn a slideshow presentation onto a DVD or CD, complete with fancy transitions, animations and sound effects, which can then be viewed on the TV. So now everyone can be bored rigid to the beat of some funky music and flashing lights. Progress - it's a marvellous thing.

In all seriousness, Photos on TV does allow for the creation of some interesting slideshows. The program works via a simple "storyboard", which covers the bottom half of the screen, with directory, properties and preview windows on top of it. You browse photos in the directory window, dragging and dropping those you wish to include in the photoshow into the storyboard. Each individual frame can then be tweaked in properties, and the preview window lets you to watch the whole show through.

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So what sort of tweaking can be done to your snaps? Adding text is an easy task, with the usual selection of fonts and colours, and also transitions so the words can slide, fade up or stretch into view. The same transition effects can be applied when switching photos, with about twenty different effects in total plus a number of minor variations. The snazzier tricks involve fancy dissolves and even morphing, although there are no instructions provided for the sub-menu which adjusts the latter, and that isn't very helpful.

Furthermore, although the manual indicates that the program is supposed to randomise transitions on a new project - so you don't have to go through and manually set them if you don't wish to - this doesn't happen. It uses the same transition for all. You'll probably want to set them all individually anyway, so it's a minor point, but an annoyance nonetheless.

It's also possible to add music to your slideshow and again this is a simple matter of dragging and dropping a tune from your hard disk into the storyboard. Any number of songs can be included, and Photos on TV automatically cross-fades between them. If you've got a microphone set up on your PC, you can also record commentary to the slideshow, which is a smart touch.

As with most photo slideshow programs, this one includes a built-in image editor, but it's rather poor. There are basic rotate and crop functions, brightness, contrast and colour tuning menus, along with a red-eye removal tool. Unfortunately the latter isn't up to much, and while it lessens the redness it still leaves the eye looking a little unnatural.

There are quirks with the interface, too. For example, the text box doesn't register typing unless the mouse cursor is left hovering over it, which can be annoying. However, we can't moan too much, because overall the interface is a simple, user friendly, drag and drop affair, with useful features such as master settings that adjust the properties of every photo frame in the slideshow.

When it comes to burning your work of art onto a disc, the program handles this with just a couple of clicks. The process takes quite a while - it first has to convert the photoshow's format before writing the data - and you end up with a VCD format disc which should play in any DVD player. Our test photoshow worked fine in our Panasonic DVD machine.

Photos on TV is easy to use and produces decent results. There are some clumsy design elements in the program and weaknesses such as the sub-standard image editing facilities, but it represents a good deal at this budget price level.