Michael Stutz wrote:
>
> Howard--
>
> Cool. The "proprietary format" part of PhotoCDs kinda scared me at
> first, but I guess there's nothing to worry about. Have you ever had
> any prints made from a PhotoCD? This I think is the most exciting
> thing about this format -- I guess for the same price (or less) of
> having a lab make a good 8x10 enlargement, you can have your
> GIMP-modified PhotoCD file (TIFF, JPEG or whatever) printed on a
> Fujix 3000 printer and the quality will rival the traditional print.
>
Michael,
Don't get your hopes up. I have been investigating to see just what I
can output from my new Epson Stylus Color 600. The weak link in the
PhotoCD process is memory. Their maximum resolution is 3072x2048. When
you write this out to disk in uncompressed 24_bit format, it takes
eighteen megs of disk space and RAM. I actually managed to load this
into xpaint, but it took awhile, and you can forget about multitasking!
My machine has twenty megs of RAM and fifty megs of swap. I am here to
tell you that my photo file used all of them. Another problem is that,
at 720dpi, an 3072x2048 image doesn't use up very many inches.
The printer's resolution is vastly better than that of your computer
monitor.
Read the PostScript manual for XV sometime. It explains why XV only
writes out PostScript files at 72dpi. 720dpi (Epson Styus) is the
number of pixels per inch. The number of actual colour spots per inch
is based on the number of pixels required to dither it.
Chemical emulsions have far better resultion than anything I have seen
on a practical computer. This may change. Meanwhile, all of your old
film is digitizable in whatever format eventually comes out.
--
Howard Gibson
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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