So, I've been hunting more on this. I'm finding more and more potentially suitable devices but ge I wish I could see them in real life! Just not prepared to spend the $$ when 50% reviews are good and 50% reviews are bad.
It seems there are many portable DVD players that accept all the major cards and play the JPG images on them. But it seems very few of these are by the major brands. eBay has lots of them listed but not major brands. Who knows what they're like in real life, with respect to quality and usability?
An example of a perhaps suitable eBay one:
http://cgi.ebay.com.au/9-2-PORTABLE-...QQcmdZViewItem
A google on "digital photo album" returns a few hits, like this "PhotoShare" one which is nice and compact, has zoom and navigation, but LCD and resizing issues according to reviews:
http://shopper.cnet.com/Photoco_Phot...-32155083.html
And then there's still the Philips photo frame that has battery and the best image quality of all it seems:
http://reviews.cnet.com/Philips_Digi....html?tag=also
I asked in Harvey Norman and Retravision about such devices. Strangely they said flat out that no portable DVD players accept MS thumb drives and no DVD players display JPG images. That came from 3 salesman, and was blatantly wrong going by what I find on the web.
The frustrating thing now seems to be that there's devices out that that do what I want and for a good price (PhotoShare for example), but I really need to see one in person to know how good they are.
The hunt continues....