Myphotopipe.com, an online service that converts digital photographs into film quality prints, today released their Top 10 List of unusual questions, urban legend and misconceptions amateurs and professional photographers alike had about printing photographs from digital cameras.
“The digital camera happened so quickly that the consumer got way ahead of the industry,” said Myphotopipe.com CEO L. Douglas Keeney. “With all the software available, picture-takers have become terribly involved with their photos but they’re just now learning the tricks that make a great print on the back end. That’s why we started our Top 10 List. It’s a fun way to see how much everyone has learned this year.”
The list was culled from the more 5,000 questions received by the company from photographers nationwide
- Pixels versus bits? We can’t count the number of times people asked us what size their digital photo needed to be to produce a good print. It seems pixels, megapixels and dots-per-inch are still turning people inside out. Here’s an easy answer. Memory cards used to be a problem but no longer. For the sake of posterity, shoot and save in the largest file size your camera offers (usually Large Fine JPEG). Photo processors can print almost anything from that.
- Don’t try this at home. Photo prints still involve chemicals and real papers are still light sensitive so, believe it or not, we still go into a darkroom to load the paper used to make your prints. And, did you know that every time we change a roll of paper we need to recalibrate the photo printing machine for the peculiarities of that roll’s emulsions? You’re not alone.
- The oddest misconception. Beware! Prints made from a digital photo will only last 15 years. And this came in from the college campuses. The truth is professional papers last 108 years before noticeable fading.
- “You cut off my swimmers hands,” was one of our most frequent but entirely unexpected complaints, but, it taught us a good lesson; we realized that most people had no idea that no matter how you calculate it, a 4″X6″ print loses two inches when you enlarge it to an 8″X10″. Simple but unavoidable math.
- The online self-help tool that helped almost no one. A smiley face is a clever way to conceal a lot of important technology. When you upload an image a computer scans it, interpolates what it sees and gives you a frown if the photo isn’t good enough for the print size you want. Our company sets that at 150 dpi. Still, a third of our callers didn’t know what it means.
- Is a 1 megabit file too big to send over the Internet? Let’s see, more than 3 billion prints were processed online this year at, lets say, 500 kilobits a photo — that means digital camera owners pushed at least 1,500,000,000,000,000 bits (1.5 quadrillion bits) of photos across the Internet. At about $3 for an 8″X10″ print, these bits may be the most valuable bits of data in e-commerce (well, at least versus a 99-cent music download or a TV show) so, yes, send one, send 10, send 100 megabits.
- Do they really know the difference? The most common reason for reprinting a print was that the customer ordered matte (or gloss) but meant gloss (or matte). Just remember that gloss is shiny.
- Strangers in the night. Half of all orders placed in the 4th Quarter of 2005 were from people that had never used an online service. We were strangers They were strangers. But we got along famously.
- Who says this is a snapshot business? The largest print made in the same manner as a snapshot was a print eight -feet wide and four-feet tall. It was for the Atlanta Falcons.
- The most expensive online print size? $245 for a 48 X 96-inch print.
https://www.myphotopipe.com/
About Myphotopipe.com
Myphotopipe.com is an online print processing service that caters to the needs of serious amateur and professional photographers. Using our streamlined web interface, photographers have access to a high-end print processing lab from anywhere in the nation. We combine four essential ingredients to assure the highest quality — we operate our own machines, we hand inspect every print, we give photographers more than 94 standard print sizes to choose from, and lab staff, each one a serious amateur or professional photographer in their own right, brings more than 125 years of experience to every print we make.
This article was last modified on January 3, 2023
This article was first published on January 4, 2006
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