When syncing photos to the Zune HD it resizes them down to a much lower resolution which means I cannot load a high res picture on it (comic book) and zoom in to read it. This defeats the whole purpose of having a zoom feature.

There is a registry hack you can make to get the Zune to display under My Computer. Then if you killed the zune process while it's syncing you'd be able to access it like a hard drive and copy files to it. It seems like the more recent firmware and/or Zune software version now prevents this.

How can I treat it like an HDD and copy files to it? I simply want to take my original pictures folder and copy it over the low resolution versions the Zune software resized it to.

An alternative option would be to remove the hard drive from it and see if I can connect it to a computer directly, but I just got this and don't want to disassemble it yet.

Note to Microsoft: Why do you allow me to set the encoding quality of music, but not photos?