In America, Sony has announced the HDMS-S1D Digital Photo Album for shutterbugs who want to archive, organise and make slideshows of their digital photos.

This device features an 80GB hard drive, connects to a high definition television via HDMI and showcases up to 50,000 high resolution photos.

The new digital photo album offers several methods for importing photos, including multiple flash memory card formats, CD, DVD, USB or Ethernet. Once imported, photo collections can be managed with the supplied remote control and the device’s interface.

Photos can be organised by date, special occasions such as birthdays and travel (using pre-selected icons), or into as many as 3,000 different photo albums.

The digital photo album also provides the ability to review, edit, rotate, delete and arrange photos for a slideshow or digital scrapbooking with Sony’s x-Application features.

The photo managing x-Pict Story HD software creates professional quality slideshows, eliminating the need for PC-based photo editing.

Slideshows can be created by selecting from 30 pre-loaded music tracks and transition styles. For personalisation, you can add up to five songs from your own CDs.

The software also allows for connection to a compatible printer for making prints of your photos or scrapbook pages directly from the device.

The HDMS-S1D Digital Photo Album uses Sony’s face detection technology to locate faces in photographs and adjusts the slideshow transitions around the location of faces.

The HDMS-S1D Digital Photo Album will be available in October for about $400.