Entries this day: _big_prints light

big prints

From The New York Times:

Goliath, Your Prints Are Ready

By DAVID POGUE

     At a dinner party at our house last week, a guest was so blown
away by something he saw in my little high-tech workshop that he never
even made it to the hors d'oeuvres.

Of course, there's always quite a bit of gee-whiz technology lying
around the premises. In fact, if you had to describe the décor, you
might describe it as New England Circuit City. But what made such an
impression on our visitors wasn't a gizmo or a gadget - it was a
piece of paper.

Specifically, it was an enormous glossy photo, 13 by 19 inches. What
so impressed our guest was its amazing quality and its vibrant,
popping colors, and the fact that I had printed it myself only five
minutes earlier, using an ordinary inkjet printer.

All right, "ordinary" isn't quite the word. To create photo posters
like this, you need an especially wide inkjet, like the Epson Stylus
Photo 1280 or the new Canon S9000, both priced at $500. (That's the
list price; shopping online can save you about $50.)

Many a popular technology today can be safely described as "not there
yet."  Cellphones aren't there yet. Neither are laptop batteries. Lord
knows PC's aren't there yet.

Photo printers, however, have arrived. Both of these printers spray
six different ink colors (not four, as with most inkjets) to produce
astonishing images. When you feed these machines special photo paper
(about 50 cents a sheet up to 8 1/2-by-11 size), you can't tell the
difference between a printout from the Canon S9000 or Epson 1280 and a
Kodak-developed print, even if you mash your eyeball right up to the
paper.

Now recall the best photo print you've ever seen, and imagine it at 13
by 19 inches, filling your field of vision. Something happens to the
impact of a photo when it's that big. Its emotional overtones are
disproportionately magnified in ways that photo galleries have
capitalized on for years. A candid of a smiling 2-year-old becomes an
unforgettable essay on captured innocence. A stand of trees against a
dark pre-storm sky delivers a palpable chill. It's like the difference
between seeing an Imax movie and watching TV.

One reason most people have never seen their photos at that size is
that they're very expensive: about $25 each from traditional photo
labs. If you own a wide-format inkjet photo printer, on the other
hand, the cost of paper and ink works out to about $2 per
poster. (Online, the 13-by-19-inch photo paper costs about $18 per
10-sheet package.)

Of course, few consumers would leap to spend $500 for a printer that
produces only jumbo prints. After all, the average home has only so
much empty wall space. (On the other hand, one of these printers could
be the cornerstone of a promising business. Heck, just by sitting in
Times Square with a digital camera, cranking out posters of tourists
for $10 a shot, you could retire to Bermuda by the end of the summer.)

Fortunately, these printers are equally capable of printing at more
conventional sizes, all the way down to 4 by 6. In fact, the Canon
S9000 and Epson 1280 are nothing more than stretch-limo versions of
the earlier Canon S900 and Epson Stylus Photo 890 - models you might
consider, in fact, if you relish the thought of superb photographic
quality but don't feel that the added dimensions are worth an extra
$100 or $200.

The Canon and Epson machines are cut from similar cloth. Both connect
to Macs (even those running Mac OS X) and PC's, are very quiet and
take up considerable desk space: two feet across and one foot deep. If
you use the recommended photo paper and mount the pictures under
glass, the images are supposed to remain colorfast for at least 25
years. (I'm still testing this claim, however. Watch this space in
2027.)

Based on research indicating that Americans prefer pictures that
"pop," each company offers an option that heightens color
saturation. The results look more vivid than real life, which is what
makes most American viewers describe the prints as
spectacular. (According to Canon, people in Europe and Asia tend to
prefer more realistic colors.)

Similar though they are in concept, however, the two rival machines
have extremely different specs, which may make a buying decision even
more difficult.

The new Canon printer, for example, is far faster than the year-old
Epson - it's finished with its work and home in the hot tub just as
the Epson is getting its morning coffee. Printing a 13-by-19 poster
takes the Canon about five minutes; the Epson takes nearly three times
as long. The Canon can polish off three or four handsome letter-size
(8 1/2-by-11) enlargements in the same eight minutes it takes the
Epson to finish just one 8-by-10.

The Canon is far more economical, too, because you can replace its
color ink tanks individually ($12 each). On the Epson, you have to
throw away the entire five-tank color cartridge ($30) when any one
chamber runs out - an upsetting moment of waste that you'll have to
endure again and again, since each cartridge expires after only about
25 8-by-10's.

Both machines can produce borderless prints, coating the paper edge to
edge, at sizes up to 8 1/2 by 11 - a great feature that makes the
results seem even more professional. But the Epson manages this feat
by blowing up the picture so that its edges lie beyond the boundaries
of the paper, sometimes chopping off important parts of the photo as a
result.

The Epson isn't without its charms, however. For example, it can print
photos at a wider array of sizes than its rival, including 8 by
10. (The Canon's closest option is 8 1/2 by 11. Surprisingly, the
company doesn't even make 8-by-10 photo paper.) The Epson also
accommodates special 4-inch-wide rolls of photo paper for convenience
in churning out 4-by-6 photos.

The Epson also comes with Adobe's outstanding Photoshop Elements
retouching program, which costs about $90 if purchased separately. The
printer even has a transparent lid, so you can watch the actual
ink-spraying process. It's a lot more fun than it sounds.

The Epson's trump card, however, is its ability to make borderless
prints at the 13-by-19 size. Canon's machine leaves a half-inch white
border all the way around those largest prints, a big disappointment.

If you think you might feel cheated by that last strip of white around
the poster-size shots, the Epson's efforts may be worth waiting
for. Otherwise, the Canon S9000 is the superior printer, especially in
speed and economy.

Either way, you'll need to invest perhaps $15 in a U.S.B. cord, a
crucial cable that neither manufacturer includes. And remember that
these printers guzzle pixels like a 747 guzzles fuel. Don't even think
about them unless you own a scanner or high-resolution digital
camera. Even a 3.3-megapixel camera is barely adequate; stretching its
photos to 13 by 19 can introduce subtle dot patterns in your
printouts. Photos from a four-megapixel camera produce solid,
continuous-tone printouts even at large sizes - just don't crop
them much before printing them. Five- and six-megapixel cameras, of
course, put large-format printers in pig heaven.

Once you're equipped, these printers take the concept of a digital
darkroom to a powerful new level. You'll gain much more control over
which photos you print out and at what sizes, and visitors, standing
slack-jawed before your enlargements, will give you more credit for
camera skills than you may actually have.

Just don't take them in to see your gallery until after the hors
d'oeuvres.

light

25 April 2002

Vectorial Elevation is an interactive artwork designed to transform the Artium Square in Vitoria-Gasteiz, capital city of the Basque Country, Spain.

Using a three dimensional interface this web site allows you to design a light sculpture with 18 robotic searchlights located around the Square. A web page is made for each participant with photos from 4 webcams. The piece will be live from April 22 until May 5, 2002 to coincide with the opening of the Basque Museum of Contemporary Art ARTIUM.

https://www2.alzado.net

My first attempt