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Author Topic: Printing versus Display  (Read 2290 times)

Deepsouth

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Printing versus Display
« on: May 10, 2010, 02:05:46 pm »

This may be the wrong forum for this, but it may also be the right one. A recent comment to this forum got me thinking about my printing costs. I spend about USD250 a year on ink, and maybe another USD100 on media. I also spend about USD200-300 on framing, either for my family or as gifts. This makes me a casual printer by LL standards.  

There's a company called BigeFrame, http://www.bigeframe.com/ and they have a 24 inch display for about USD679. We have many thousands of images worthy of looking at, more than we could ever possibly hope to print (let alone wall space to hang 'em on).  Having a display to show these on, creating custom slideshows, is all very intriguiging. I might add that we have an Apple TV box, so we can also do this on our 50 inch DLP telly. However, we rarely do that unless we have guests over and we want to torture, I mean, entertain, them with vacation pix. Besides, the lamp in the DLP costs USD140 and  we get about three years out of each one.

I can see always having a good printer (13 inch carriage) around. Sometimes only a print or card will do. I don't see us buying a bigger machine or expanding our printing for every image we'd love to look at full size. But I can see spending about USD800 on a fully-tricked out LCD frame and recouping that cost inside of two years by reducing our printing work. Not to mention that  images of sufficently high res look wonderful on a good LCD display, no more fretting over profiling or media.

heresy or a hot idea?
« Last Edit: May 10, 2010, 02:06:31 pm by Deepsouth »
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natas

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Printing versus Display
« Reply #1 on: May 10, 2010, 02:53:12 pm »

heresy I say. I don't mind looking at my images on a screen when editing but I cannot stand the LCD picture frames (even really nice ones).

They waste energy (my wife is a freak when it comes to stuff like this) and just don't look as good when viewing close up (compared to a print). This is just me, but hey if you like it whatever floats your boat. The geeky side of me does like the idea though.
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feppe

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Printing versus Display
« Reply #2 on: May 10, 2010, 03:08:10 pm »

Good point about the prices. I could buy a very nice large TV with the price of an upgrading my printer to a proper 17" model and printing some decent volume. You could probably pay for the price of electricity as well. PPI is not such a big issue with larger frames as you're not going to look at them from nose length - but heat generated is and the fact that it would illuminate the whole room.

It's only a matter of time until digital frames surpass print on all meaningful quantifiable metrics. I doubt LCD/DLP/LED tech will be the one to finally make the change due to them emitting light. Different implementations of e-ink or other non-light-emitting techs are more likely candidates - but those are several years away.

I'm also sure there will also be a niche for prints, just like there is still a niche for film - that reminds me to unfreeze a few rolls of 6x6 Provia

bill t.

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Printing versus Display
« Reply #3 on: May 10, 2010, 06:35:10 pm »

Looking at this from another angle, digital media does not have a good record for longevity.  Hard disc crashes, technological obsolescence, and the like tend to lose a lot of pictures.  I have heard stories of baby pictures lost forever to a computer crash or virus attack.

So in that light you might do well to make good quality pigmented prints of your most treasured images.  Printed images will make it into the future simply by being stored in a safe place.  For digital media you need to repeatedly copy your images to new media before the old media, obsolescent media becomes impossible to read.  I'm thinking about that drawer of decade-old backup tapes that I am sure can no longer be recovered by any reasonable means.  But my family snapshot prints from that time survive quite nicely.  And the old 16mm family movies from the 30's still look good, try reading your DVD in 2090.
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feppe

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Printing versus Display
« Reply #4 on: May 10, 2010, 07:18:29 pm »

Quote from: bill t.
Looking at this from another angle, digital media does not have a good record for longevity.  Hard disc crashes, technological obsolescence, and the like tend to lose a lot of pictures.  I have heard stories of baby pictures lost forever to a computer crash or virus attack.

So in that light you might do well to make good quality pigmented prints of your most treasured images.  Printed images will make it into the future simply by being stored in a safe place.  For digital media you need to repeatedly copy your images to new media before the old media, obsolescent media becomes impossible to read.  I'm thinking about that drawer of decade-old backup tapes that I am sure can no longer be recovered by any reasonable means.  But my family snapshot prints from that time survive quite nicely.  And the old 16mm family movies from the 30's still look good, try reading your DVD in 2090.

That is a legitimate concern, but easily circumvented. Just copy all your old files to your new computer. Disk space is so cheap these days there should be no excuse not to. If you rely on a DVD to be read in 80 years (or even 8), you're doing it wrong. Just roll everything to HDDs, SSD, holographic memory or whatever is the most cost-efficient way to keep your photo backups current.

I have an acquaintance who lost the photos of the first 5 years of his first kid's life to a virus. Must have been devastating. I bet he backups now.

The problem with prints and albums is they deteriorate with time (admittedly not much if kept well), and one fire, theft, or broken water pipe will render them useless. Multiple backups, at least one of them offline and offsite, will give several copies of the same files without any deterioration in quality.

The biggest threats are proprietary formats such as .cr2, .nef and .dng - although the latter seems quite future-proof from what I've read. There is no guarantee they can be read in the future, and it is important to remember to convert all your files to whatever is the standard format when they die.

Deepsouth

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Printing versus Display
« Reply #5 on: May 11, 2010, 09:33:43 am »

Quote from: feppe
That is a legitimate concern, but easily circumvented. Just copy all your old files to your new computer. Disk space is so cheap these days there should be no excuse not to. If you rely on a DVD to be read in 80 years (or even 8), you're doing it wrong. Just roll everything to HDDs, SSD, holographic memory or whatever is the most cost-efficient way to keep your photo backups current.

I have an acquaintance who lost the photos of the first 5 years of his first kid's life to a virus. Must have been devastating. I bet he backups now.

The problem with prints and albums is they deteriorate with time (admittedly not much if kept well), and one fire, theft, or broken water pipe will render them useless. Multiple backups, at least one of them offline and offsite, will give several copies of the same files without any deterioration in quality.

The biggest threats are proprietary formats such as .cr2, .nef and .dng - although the latter seems quite future-proof from what I've read. There is no guarantee they can be read in the future, and it is important to remember to convert all your files to whatever is the standard format when they die.

I appreciate the responses. We keep an offsite backup of our critical files, and another offsite backup of my (non-day job) work files. I'm scanning the most cherished pix into TIFs and these are part of the offsites back ups. We also have Time Machine
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