ISSN 1068-9109
Several interesting things have occupied my time or thoughts recently. The most recent are related to photographs--stock photos from an agency and photos from my family.
The calculation goes as follows: because the printer is capable of printing only black or white (no grays) for each of those dots, you have to agglomerate dots into spots. Each spot is made up of a grid of dots. Say that you assign a 2 by 2 array of dots to one spot: that will give you five gray levels -- all four dots black, 3 black, 2 black, 1 black, and all white. If you have a 600 dpi printer then the two dots per spot mean that you have a 300 spot per inch printer where each spot has five gray levels. Now five gray levels is far too few -- you wind up with a posterized print, so named because it looks like a poster with few colors. (You can see this effect in the detail photo on the first page--the faces mainly went to a clown white because I gave the system very few gray levels.) A more reasonable number of grays is 100, which means an array of ten by ten dots per spot, which in turn means that we have 60 spots per inch. Well, that's too few spots, so we compromise by going for 72 spots per inch, which means we have 600/72=8 dots per spot, or 65 levels of gray. If we had a choice, we would want more spots per inch and more gray levels, but with a 600 dpi printer we can't get both.
OK, back to the thumbnails. One more rule of thumb is that you want the resolution of the picture (in pixels per inch) to be about 50% higher than the resolution of the printer (in spots per inch). So if the printer's resolution is 72 spots per inch, we want the picture to be about 100 pixels per inch. The thumbnails are 200x300 pixels, which corresponds to a maximum printed size of 2"x3" for the 600 dpi printer. Obviously we cannot fill a page with an image and have it look good, but we can print reasonable-sized pictures for visual accents. Or we can cut the number of gray levels and turn the bane of posterization into a feature by using a much larger image as a watermark. Many other tricks can be played to make use of these low-resolution thumbnail pictures.
So what's the cost and what are the licensing issues? The cost was $30 (show special, normally $50). The license for the sampler disc limits usage of the low-resolution thumbnails to comps and in-house presentations. The 25 high-resolution images on the sampler disk are covered by the standard license for all their other high-resolution image disks, which limits image usage to items that are normally thrown away (brochures, promotional posters, newspaper ads, menus, newsletters (sob!), and so on), but does not include items that are normally kept or in which the image itself is a part of the product (such as books, placemats, greeting cards, wall paper, CD booklets). An alternate way of looking at it is if the photo is an integral part of the item, (such as t-shirt or greeting card) and that item is for sale, an additional inexpensive license is needed, otherwise use of the photo is unlimited. For full details you should read the full license agreement (which is wonderfully short and understandable), but the reason I'm excited about the PhotoDisc sampler is that I can use the thumbnails in it on in-house newsletters and presentations. 4000 thumbnail plus 25 hi-resolution images for $50 -- you can't beat it. And, of course, eventually you will do what PhotoDisc is counting on -- you will spend the $300 to buy a volume (typically 330 high-res images) to get the higher resolution and license to use the images in newsletters, ads, brochures, and so on.
How is it that I am using these sampler images in a general-distribution newsletter? I executed a special license with them for this one-time use. The PhotoDisc people are reasonable with reasonable license provisions -- you'll enjoy working with them and their product.
Photodisc
2013 Fourth Avenue
Seattle, WA 98121
(800) 528-3472
To put this into perspective, PhotoDisc charges $295 (MSRP) per disk, each of which has 300-400 images, so at first blush they appear to cost four times as much as the Corel single-disk price. However, PhotoDisc has made up a nice photo selector system using ImagePals, so finding the photo you want is relatively easy. Also they have a nice printed catalog with 1" x 1 1/2" thumbnails which is wonderful for browsing. In contrast, I find it much harder to find the image I want with Corel's disks. The thing to remember is that what is important is the cost per image you can use, not the cost per image that you own but have trouble locating.
Photo costs are slippery numbers, though. Note that the cost per Corel photo is $0.25 if you buy just one disk, but falls all the way to $0.05 if you buy their 200-disk Digital Photo Library. Compare this to the cost of getting your own pictures into the computer and you see that it is often more cost-effective to use even top-of-the-line stock photos from PhotoDisc (approx $0.75 to $1.00 per image). Here are the most popular ways of getting your own photos into the computer: scan it with your own scanner, send it out to be scanned, or get a PhotoCD made. If you scan it yourself you probably will scan a print because transparency or negative scanners are much more expensive. But a print has lost a lot of the highlight and shadow detail, and the scanner can't put it back. Also, most hand scanners get you only 200-300 dpi in full color mode, which means you get about 1000 to 1500 lines for a full 5" print. Flat bed scanners cost more, but the better ones have higher resolution and better illumination than the hand scanners. Don't be enticed by higher resolution that is the result of interpolation, though -- all it does is make the file bigger without adding any detail. It's a great marketing ploy but a scanner with high interpolated resolution cannot do any better than a scanner without if you are using a high-end photo manipulation program (like PhotoShop or Picture Publisher) that has good filters and resampling algorithms.
OK, what's it all cost? Handheld color scanners start at about $250, flatbed grayscale at about $500, and flatbed color at about $750. The flatbeds tend to come with better photomanipulation software, typically PhotoShop LE. If you want better real resolution than 300 dpi, you are talking significantly more money ($1200), or if you want to scan negatives or transparencies, the add-on cost is a minimum of $350 over the cost of the basic flatbed scanner. Most transparency heads cost considerably more. If the transparencies/negatives are 35mm slides, you can use the Nikon CoolScan or Polaroid SprintScan 35 which are made expressly for that purpose. They cost about $2000.
If you send the stuff to a service bureau for scanning, the price depends on the desired resolution and scanning method. Drum scans are wonderful but expensive (more than the cost of a Corel PhotoCD disk), CoolScan cost $6, and flatbed scans also run in the $4-6 range.
A different kind of service bureau is your friendly neighborhood Kodak film processor or photo supply store. You can get your film (not prints) transferred onto a PhotoCD, which is a CD-ROM readable by most modern CD-ROM players. The pricing and service varies a lot -- last month I happily told you about Samy's and their wonderful Fiju color printer. This month I am a lot less impressed because they quoted me a price of $2.37 per image for making a PhotoCD (it does include the cost of processing the roll of film) and a turn-around time of 10 days. Many people send their film to LazerQuick, who charge $0.59/image plus $9.95 for the disk. I've found LazerQuick takes about a week to do the job, plus another week for the shipping time to and from them. My personal favorite is ADI (Advanced Digital Imaging) who charges $0.65/image but has no surcharge for the disk. They charge $1.35/image if the film is cut or if you want to select specific images out of a roll (as contrasted to transferring all of the roll to the PhotoCD). If you need the film developed, ADI charges $2.95 per roll of C41 process color print film, or for other kinds of color film (like slide film) $7.95 for 36 exposure or $5.95 for 24 exposure rolls. ADI turns the order around in a day, so with FedEx you can get the disk back three business days after you sent in the film.
Comparing prices from these three services is interesting: for a 36 exposure film developed and transferred to PhotoCD, Samy's charges $85.32 and takes ten days, LaserQuick charges $31.19 plus cost of developing (which I think is about $4) and takes about ten days after taking shipping delays into account, and ADI charges $26.35 (assuming color print film). FedEx costs $11.75 for second-day service, so for $49.85 you can FedEx the film to ADI, they develop it and copy the images to PhotoCD, and they FedEx it back, all within five business days. All for significantly less money and less than half the time of Samy's. And even though at first blush ADI looks more expensive than LazerQuick, sometimes they are not -- it just depends on how many rolls you want on a PhotoCD and what processing is needed.
A PhotoCD can hold up to 100 color images or 300 black and white images. The images are always saved in five different resolutions: 128x192 (wallet), 256x384 (snapshot), 512x768 (standard), 1024x1536 (large), and 2048x3072 (poster). One of the advantages of a PhotoCD is you can also get a player that will show them on a standard TV. This is often more pleasant than using a slide projector because there is no noisy fan to shout over, the bulb rarely burns out, and there are no slides to get stuck or inserted backwards or upside down.
Even if you confine yourself to using the PhotoCD only with the computer it has advantages over a homemade scan. The highest resolution of the PhotoCD is about double that of a scan of a 5" print, and since it was made from the original film the highlight and shadow detail have not been lost. However, life becomes more complicated if you want to go from something other than 35mm film. One of the reasons the prices for the PhotoCD are so much less than using a service bureau to do scans is that much of the process is automated. That's why ADI, for instance, charges twice as much if the film is cut or you want only certain images -- someone has to feed in the next strip of film or select the proper image. Other film formats, such as 120 or 4x5, are not in continuous rolls, so every image has to be handled separately. The facts that the equipment is more expensive and there is less work done in these sizes all adds up to much higher prices: ADI charges $12/image for 120 film or 4x5 copied to PhotoCD. And if you need even higher resolution, the PhotoCD Pro includes the ultra-high resolution of 4096x6144 in addition to the normal other five resolutions. This costs $15/image from ADI no matter what film format is used.
Why do I know and care about this stuff? I have a bunch of negatives from my great-uncle Homer Davis who lived in Burbank since the beginning of the century. Many of the pictures are meaningless now -- we don't know the people or places. But others are treasures: pictures of bustling downtown Burbank in 1916, or of U.S. Army Air Corps planes at Grand Central Airport, or of the aftermath of the 1927 flood after the failure of Mulholland Dam. Other pictures are family treasures: aunts and uncles as children, the places we lived, worked, and played, and so on. But there are some problems: the negatives have been poorly cared for, many were poorly exposed, and all are vulnerable to accident or abuse. Printing them photographically would be only a partial solution, but a very expensive one. If done commercially, we're talking about several dollars a print (the film is an archaic and very weird size), only one copy of the prints would exist, and nothing would be done to erase some of the damage. I tried scanning them on my flatbed scanner and quickly realized that you cannot get a decent scan of a negative without getting the transparency head (approx $600 for my scanner). And scanning is slow -- about two minutes/image after allowing time for scan, name, and save the file. Sending approximately 300 negatives to ADI for scanning at $12/image was more than I wanted to contemplate, even though PhotoCD is a suitable archive medium. So what I did was split the difference: I made up a light box to illuminate the negatives, loaded my old 35mm camera (which fortunately has a macro lens) with black and white film, and photographed the negatives. I developed the film myself (very cheap and easy to do) so I could check for glaring errors before sending the film to ADI. I thought that the scans were slow at 2 minutes each -- the process of photographing the negatives was no faster. Sure, the shutter took only a fraction of a second, but pulling the old negative out of the carrier, putting in the next one, measuring the light, setting the camera, etc and &c. all came to (guess what) two minutes per image.
Now I have to balance the cost of PhotoCD against the alternative of scanning the pictures myself. One of the truly wonderful things about the PhotoCD was that I took the ones I had already made of great-uncle Homer's pictures to show my father and sisters. We viewed them on the TV and did an audio recording of their comments, which we can now add to the pictures (so that's who that is!) and make an album. If I get the transparency head for the scanner I could then scan the negatives myself. But the resolution (both spatial and intensity) would not be nearly as good, nor would I be able to show them on a TV (the TV picture appears to be better than many prints). Also, PhotoCDs are easily and cheaply duplicated, so now everyone in the family can have their own copy which is every bit as good as the original.
As you can tell I am still wrestling with the following facts: if I scan the negatives myself I have to lay out $600 for a transparency head and settle for scans which are not nearly as good. If I continue photographing the negatives onto 35mm film I pay $0.65 x 300 images = $195, plus the cost of the film and chemicals (another $100 or so). The PhotoCD costs only half as much as getting the head, so the conclusion seems clear. Clear, that is, until we started looking at my father-in-law's collection. He has hundreds of 3.5"x5.5" negatives from his father taken at the turn of the century. He also has something like 40,000 35mm negatives, many of which have never been printed (round tuits are hard to find). These negatives aren't of anything important, just the kid's first steps, birthdays, school plays and other fluff. Let's see now, 40,000 x $0.65 = a whole bunch of money. Buying the whole PhotoCD writer rig from Kodak costs about $35,000 for the 35mm version, if I recall correctly. The Pro version, which can only go up to 4x5 (not quite enough to get all of the 3.5"x5.5" format) costs a whole bunch more.
I wonder when Kodak will license the technology to the normal CD-ROM recorder manufacturers (like Pinnacle, Sony, and others)? Their drives cost only $2K-$6K. Of course the Kodak writer includes a minicomputer with lots of RAM to deal with the images (each one takes 18MB in normal PhotoCD format, or 74MB in the ultra-high Pro format), so it's definitely not fair to compare a $2K bare recorder with the $35K Kodak film scanner- computer-recorder-disk autostacker system.
LazerQuick
27375 SW Parkway Ave
Wilsonville, OR 97070-2210
800-937-9196
ADI
112 E. Olive St.
Ft. Collins, CO 80524
800-888-3686
But that is only the tip of the iceberg. Here's the really unique and beautiful feature of Seize the Day: It has graphics you wouldn't believe! The "time cycling" feature of the program is mind-boggling. Seize comes with twelve monthly graphics, each of which remains the same on a monthly basis. However -- and this is the great and addictive surprise about it -- the scene cycles through various times of the day and various weather conditions throughout the days of the month; snow, rain, lightning, etc. In the morning the light is what you can expect to see at that time of day. At night the scene is dark, with or without moonlight, stars and a rising moon, which move throughout the skies as they would in nature. For instance, this morning at 9:00 AM a scene consisting of a castlelike ruin with trees in the foreground was sunny. Late this afternoon the scene began to darken and rain fell in a very realistic manner. Oh, yes, it should be added that the trees in the foreground -- green early in October -- have now turned into beautiful autumn colors and continue to do so throughout the remainder of this month (I peeked, as one can do using the optional "time travel" feature.) And to further give away the plot, there are special surprises such as fireworks on the 4th and ghosts on Halloween. The animation of waterfalls, ocean tides and lakes has to be seen to be believed.
The alarm feature allows you to select anything from Vivaldi to guitar through reggae or Gregorian chant and the sound is great. While a very nice feature, Seize must be active in order for the alarm to function at a given time.
The installation takes close to 8 Mgs., requires 256 colors, Windows 3.1, and a sound card. A selection of artworks and various scenes is available, ranging from portraiture through various types of graphics -- all of a very high quality according to those received and those viewed in the picture catalog provided. The suggested retail price for the basic program, which includes two samples of other selected art, is about $60.
Ed. note: This article arrived by fax which was then scanned on a Microtek ScanMaker II using TextBridge 2.0. I found very few spelling errors and other typos -- any that appear are the result of my not checking carefully enough -- Helen does not make typos!
Seize the Day, Inc.
P.O. Box 833
Calistoga, CA 94515
Phone (707) 942-2983 (24 hrs. daily) or FAX (707) 942-2998.