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Sure, it's a good idea. And I really don't mind there being more competition in the market, but isn't CafePress already doing this with all sorts of apparel and other easily printable goods? In addition, isn't Stamps.com already doing this with stamps. And aren't there a number of sites that do this with photographs?

Yeah, printing customized materials cheaply is a great service... and combining the best features of all the currently available sites can only benefit us as a whole, but it's not unique and I'd be surprised if it were a big success.

Why not use an on-line printing service?

http://www.ofoto.com

http://www.elcocolor.com/

http://www.digital-photo-matrix.com/products-overs ize-prints.html

Do not send large attachments over email.

Again, do not send large attachments over email.

Nothing is worse then trying to download a really important email, but being stuck waiting for a hand full of large, mostly less-important messages to download. Ofoto, Shutterfly, and others offer free image hosting, allowing your friends & family the chance to view pictures at their leisure -- and often order hard copies as a bonus. Not everybody has broadband access, and us "Technology Haves" should be teaching the "have nots" to 1) not send huge f'in emails and 2) don't blindly open every attachment you get.

In conclusion, do not send large attachments over email.

They do..

I realize this doesn't prove much, because none of you know which one of us is which. But here are the pictures. That would be *me* soldering, despite boarder's faulty memory, and him meticulously slicing the wires out of an IDE cable to make a little connector block.

Yes, we're both dorks. I might be somewhat worse.

Dorky Pictures

These are some of the free (speech or beer) software I'd install on a family, non-gaming machine:

• Web Browser: Mozilla or Mozilla Firebird
• E-mail: Mozilla (cross-platform), Mozilla Thunderbird (cross-platform), Evolution (Gnome), or KMail (KDE)
• Office Suite: OpenOffice.org
• Media Player: QuickTime (Windows), Zinf (cross-platform), RealPlayer (cross-platform), WinAmp (Windows), MPlayer (Windows), XMMS (Linux)
• Image Viewer: IrfanView (Windows)
• Instant Messaging: Gaim (cross-platform)
• Personal Information Management: Palm Desktop Software (great PIM suite even if you don't own a Palm)
• Other: Acrobat Reader (although I'm weary of their DRM), Java 2 Runtime Environment, Macromedia Flash and Shockwave players, Ad-Aware (spyware remover for Windows), ZoneAlarm, Sygate Personal Firewall (firewall, alternative to ZoneAlarm), Grisoft AVG Anti-Virus, FileZilla, WinRAR (not free, shareware with nag window), Ofoto desktop software (basic photo album and touch-ups, even if you don't use Ofoto's online services)

Some other software I'd install on my own desktop (dev), in decreasing order of importance:

• Cygwin, bascially all packages
• UltraEdit32 (45-day trial shareware)
• TightVNC
• Ghostscript and GSView
• Java 2 SDK
• Eclipse
• Borland JBuilder Personal
• ActiveState Perl, Python, Tcl/Tk (yes, even though they are in Cygwin), Jython
• GIMP
• POV-Ray
• At least one of Apache, Tomcat, or Plone (Zope)
• HTTrack (a website copier)

...but he's also my doppelganger!

(gotta repaste that link to get permission to view the photo, stupid ofoto bastards.)

At least, that's what I've been told.

Shutterfly - great if you plan to use Internet Explorer to communicate with the site, they have an ActiveX plug-in, where you can select multiple files to upload. Warning though, you will not be able to download your photos in original resolution once you upload them. The only way to get back a high-res photo is to buy a CD from Shutterfly.

Epson Photo Center - one of the few services where you can download exactly the same resolution as you uploaded, so great for storing large pictures. Except that they require Web forms for the photos to be uploaded, and the Web forms they have accept a single photo at a time (maximum of 10-20 per page, if I recall). Might spend your whole evening clicking and selecting, when downloading 1000 new images off your flash card.

Ofoto - nothing too thrilling, pretty much the same offering as Shuttefly without the ActiveX plug in for multiple uploads. Has connections with Amazon, so it's possible to get some promotinal free photos with them if you buy some related items at Amazon. I got 25 free photos with the software I bought at Amazon site.

Yahoo! Photos - 30 megs is a bummer, but if you use other Yahoo! services regularly, might find the site easier to navigate and play with. Although all other guys mentioned above allow unlimited (well, supposedly) hosting and sharing.

already exists here.

These services burn your digital image on to ordinary film paper - the same stuff they use to make your prints from negatives in the lab. How do they do this? Instead of exposing the print paper to a darkroom enlarger with your negative in it, they scan the paper with a cathode ray tube (yea same technology as your monitor) and the results are actually better than a negative transfer because there isn't a second lens in the darkroom to distort and soften your image from the negative, the image goes from colored electrons to the paper directly.

as for reccomendations, I've had good service with all three, Ofoto and Shutterfly use Kodak professional and/or Kodak digital imaging paper (ofoto is owned by Kodak) and Photoaccess uses Fuji Crystal Archive paper, and also offers a beautiful matte finish paper that I use when I'm selling prints.

As for online photo display for the web, I would heartily reccomend Gallery, which is a set of PHP scripts. I have modified this software to allow print sales of my photographs. Photoaccess and all the other companies have online sharing of albums themselves, but their interfaces are mostly terrible and the preview images are way too small and lossy. (they have to go small to handle the traffic, I don't blame them) so I have my own web galleries, but I print through them.

---Mike

I've had 35mm processing from Snapfish, and ordered digital prints from both of the above, and the quality is excellent.

To get a full 24 digital prints (the average roll of film) would cost about $13 shipped... which is more than you'd pay for processing a 35mm roll. However, you have to consider that you're not paying for the film, and you also know you're only getting prints you want. How many of us _want_ every print off every roll of film? There are always bad ones and with digital you're not paying to print them.

try ezprints.com or ofoto.com. they both do a terrific job, are reasonalby prices, and use real photographic paper.

Unfortunately, the photo Michael likes so much is among a bunch that are only available at low resolution here at the Mars Odyssey Website. More important scientific photos and artist renderings are frequently available in high-quality tiff format at places like this. I don't know if they had a high enough resolution camera to take the sort of pictures needed for reprint.

If anyone can find a high-res version of this picture, please post it - I'd love to have Ofoto make an ultra high quality 8x10 for me (thanks for the idea, Michael).

A coworker of mine had prints developed from several different print houses. Ofoto and Shutterfly seem to be the best, with a slight edge in color accuracy to Ofoto.

Here are some things I have learned from using various sites:

• Shutterfly ships overseas.
• Cartogra sells Ofoto prints and Yahoo Photos sells Shutterfly prints. Make sure you get your free prints from Cartogra when the free prints at Ofoto run out.
• Yahoo's photo sharing lets you upload and download the full res images, but access controls are only public or Yahoo-id
• Cartogra won't let you download the full image, but they will let you zoom in for detail. Ofoto only lets you see a small preview
• Shutterfly lets you print, frame, & gift wrap photos as convenient, classy gifts
• Shutterfly has an option to not do automatic color correction on your image, but I have not been able to calibrate myself to the results.
• Shutterfly's interface for image editing on the web seems to be the best. You might not think it's important, but when you decide to order a 5x7 and a 4x6 from the same print it's nice to control the cropping yourself. Also, you can mock up matting for those classy photo gifts.

www.ofoto.com

www.cartogra.com

www.shutterfly.com

photos.yahoo.com

I submitted various 640 x 480 pics taken with an old Sanyo camera.

The results were quite good.

For a 4" print, minimum resolution should be 640 x 480, higher would be better. Also the lossines of the jpg file (I send some with various levels of compression) plays a role. You can easily see artifacts on highly compressed or economy mode pictures. My 640x480 pics were about 65k in size and the quality of the pics were excellent. They print the pictures on kodak paper, so it is i.e. a photograph and will last just like one (no ink fade etc.)

I think they charge about $0.40 a print, plus S&H (2.50).

You can also preview your pictures in various frames, and order them too.

Unless you are talking about a Nikon D1 (around $5,000 US) or better, digital cameras don't even approach the quality of pictures that you get from even the cheapest of 35mm cameras.

My portable camera setup consists of a Nikon F4, a and a Sony DSC-770 digital camera. The digital camera was purchased as a compliment to the 35mm system and it was very expensive in relationship to the quality of images it is able to produce. I paid nearly $1800 for this camera the same week it was introduced and I am not at all happy with the results.

There is something that all consumer grade digital cameras suffer from and there is no escaping it. It is called interpolation. And it will decrease the sharpness of your images noticeably, even to the naked eye on everyday pictures. Interpolation occurs because each pixel in the CCD array can only be a receptor for RED, GREEN, or BLUE. So when the camera takes a reading of a pixel, say a RED one, it has to guess from surounding GREEN and BLUE sensors what the GREEN and BLUE values for the pixel area covered bye this RED pixel would be. This behavoir decreases your image quality considerably, which is precisely why digicams (consumer grade) are woefully inadequate for all but the most trivial of uses.

Then there is the issue of print quality. Do you plan on using these images in print or just on the web. Most people I know that take pictures actually like to see prints of them. Ok, so lets do a little math. We'll compare my Sony DSC-770 at around $1,800 to a cheaper setup, my old Canon A1 which I paid $300 for the entire setup and my trusty Canon FS2710 film scanner at around $800 (or that's what I paid, they are probably much cheaper now).

Ok, we're still talking about making some prints. My Sony spits out uncompressed TIFF images at 1344x1024, 3.94MB which sounds huge if you're talking about web graphics, but not so huge if you're talking about making prints. My Canon scanner spits out images that are 3764x2509, 27MB at 2720dpi for a 35mm negative. Ok some quick math, ... what print quality is considered good? you've just picked up a cheapo Epson stylus to print out your images, and you want them to be sharp. Let's see,.. the Epson does 1440x700 or something like that. A quick glance at the 1440 number tells you that the Sony camera image would print out to be about an inch wide at full resolution. That's not a print, that's a stamp. Ok, something more reasonable, say 600 dpi, or maybe 300 dpi. Well at 600 dpi the Sony camera will print out an image at 2.2x1.7 inches. The Canon 35mm will print out at 6.2x4.1 inches. 4x6 is generally the smallest print that is considered reasonable. At 300 dpi (which is still a decent resolution), the Sony image will be 4.4x3.4 inches. Not even the size of a standard print. The Canon setup however will print out at a full 12x8 inches. Enough for a decent enlargement.

So once again, unless you're taking snapshots of things that aren't really to important to you, don't waste your time trying to replace your 35mm with a digital camera. If you do decide that you just gotta have a digital, then get the best one you can afford because the feature set on the low-end is strictly for point and shoot enthusiasts. Oh yeah, and be leary of the usefulness of any feature that is not directly related to increasing image quality,... most of the digicams out there nowadays are loaded with useless bells and whistles that do nothing but complicate the camera.

And one more thing, if you do get a digicam, .. the service offered by Ofoto.com is outstanding. The 100 free digital prints are worth signing up for alone. I don't work for them but I use them alot, and have grown to love it.

My two cents, Aaron Newsome.