Saturday, November 19, 2011
Christmas is coming, pressie time.
We've been so busy scanning photos it's almost slipped my mind that Christmas will soon be on us. What can a humble photo album creator give?
Well, you could go for hardware. Howabout low cost digital photoframe keyrings? Or a USB memory stick, or a storage card for a more expensive photoframe? Today's digital photoframes offer features unimaginable just a year or two ago.
I've been asked to make suggestions for low cost gifts, maybe for kids to create. Well, how about creating a slideshow? Plenty of software available, free, to give you the power and these days even a basic scanner will yield an acceptable result. The results can be provided on a CD, so perhaps one show would make a great gift for several people. A simple print in an attractive frame? Create a photo album for someone on Facebook?
Saturday, August 6, 2011
Tiny Projectors from Apple?
Prints are good, everyone likes albums, most people are getting to like computer displays and digital photoframes.
TV sets are universally understood. But if you need a really big image, as a friend did for his 60th birthday party, nothing beats projecting an image on a wall. Even schools have them hanging down from the ceiling and you just plug in your laptop, away you go. Giant sized school photos from eons ago.
You can even get tiny portable devices working on the same basis, great for mobile sales personnel or maybe taking to granny to show the latest digital images. They're called pico projectors, 3M make a great unit.
Apple? No, at least not yet, but perhaps soon given that they've nabbed the domain Applepico. Watch that space.
TV sets are universally understood. But if you need a really big image, as a friend did for his 60th birthday party, nothing beats projecting an image on a wall. Even schools have them hanging down from the ceiling and you just plug in your laptop, away you go. Giant sized school photos from eons ago.
You can even get tiny portable devices working on the same basis, great for mobile sales personnel or maybe taking to granny to show the latest digital images. They're called pico projectors, 3M make a great unit.
Apple? No, at least not yet, but perhaps soon given that they've nabbed the domain Applepico. Watch that space.
Monday, August 1, 2011
Screaming Streaming Viewing
Our businesses cover a spread of broadly analogue to digital conversions, we have a CD ripping service focused on London clients, another CD ripping offering for more distant music lovers and a photo scanning service. We keep the web sites distinct for several reasons, but much of the behind the scenes technology overlaps. As time goes by the solutions for enjoying sound and vision are coming together. One word is emerging in this congruence - streaming.
Many of our clients are getting into volume issues. High quality slide scanning generate massive files and clients are asking us to scan thousands of slides. In the last month we've ripped CD collections for three clients each of whom had in excess of 500 CDs and another batch of scanned photos took up four DVDs, just under 15 Gb of jpgs. With a PC in the study, you in the living room, how do you access your photo albums?
In these volumes it simply isn't realistic to burn a collection of albums to DVD, then stack the DVDs next to the TV so you can access your images. A much better way, at reasonable cost, is to use a device to send (or stream) data files from your PC via your home network to your TV set. The leading device is this sector is probably Apple TV but there are many other units available including an excellent little box from Sony. They will stream photos, music and videos through your network. You can also access remote services, for example with Apple TV you can buy / hire movies from the iTunes Music Store, the Sony option allows access to a subscription based service Lovefilm here in the UK. In America Netflix is massively popular.
Economically the Apple TV box, at around £90, is highly cost effective. A tub of 50 DVDs in my local High Street can set you back anything from £16 to £30 so you don't have to avoid burning many DVDs to justify the box, and that's not allowing any value for your time. Additionally Apple TV will always stream the latest version of your file complete with any edits, which is better than having to re-burn DVDs.
Many of our clients are getting into volume issues. High quality slide scanning generate massive files and clients are asking us to scan thousands of slides. In the last month we've ripped CD collections for three clients each of whom had in excess of 500 CDs and another batch of scanned photos took up four DVDs, just under 15 Gb of jpgs. With a PC in the study, you in the living room, how do you access your photo albums?
In these volumes it simply isn't realistic to burn a collection of albums to DVD, then stack the DVDs next to the TV so you can access your images. A much better way, at reasonable cost, is to use a device to send (or stream) data files from your PC via your home network to your TV set. The leading device is this sector is probably Apple TV but there are many other units available including an excellent little box from Sony. They will stream photos, music and videos through your network. You can also access remote services, for example with Apple TV you can buy / hire movies from the iTunes Music Store, the Sony option allows access to a subscription based service Lovefilm here in the UK. In America Netflix is massively popular.
Economically the Apple TV box, at around £90, is highly cost effective. A tub of 50 DVDs in my local High Street can set you back anything from £16 to £30 so you don't have to avoid burning many DVDs to justify the box, and that's not allowing any value for your time. Additionally Apple TV will always stream the latest version of your file complete with any edits, which is better than having to re-burn DVDs.
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Digital Photo Frames Enhanced
Just love my photo frame, stick some images of the memory card and away it goes. I loved it when we first got it three or four years ago and still enjoy the albums we have on it. I know from feedback from our photo scanning service clients that they love their digital photo frames too.
I haven't felt the need to upgrade the frame we have, it's made by Philips by the way, even though you can now get wi-fi addressable units. Until today when I saw this mentioned on Kodak's Facebook page. The new Kodak Pulse is email addressable.
Yes, it has its own email address. Brilliant.
That must make it dead easy to add photos but .... and this is the brilliance .... you can have photos emailed to you by friends, both from a conventional computer or from a phone. It's a great idea - your kids holiday snaps on screen immediately, family events as they happen from mobile phones, or just the odd surprise.
Suddenly photo frames take a big leap forward.
I haven't felt the need to upgrade the frame we have, it's made by Philips by the way, even though you can now get wi-fi addressable units. Until today when I saw this mentioned on Kodak's Facebook page. The new Kodak Pulse is email addressable.
Yes, it has its own email address. Brilliant.
That must make it dead easy to add photos but .... and this is the brilliance .... you can have photos emailed to you by friends, both from a conventional computer or from a phone. It's a great idea - your kids holiday snaps on screen immediately, family events as they happen from mobile phones, or just the odd surprise.
Suddenly photo frames take a big leap forward.
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Free Photo Scanning Even More Free
Just a quickie - our free photo scanning service will now return your photos free too. That makes our free scanning service entirely free of any charge from us.
Monday, March 21, 2011
Photos are Not Documents, So there.
I got into photo scanning with 1Scan via a simple job for a longstanding client. It was a straightforward task of scanning what turned out to be nearly 100 photos. I did it all on an Epson flatbed scanner. Then we won a really big job, or so I thought, just over 800 images. Same approach, it took nearly two weeks of brain numbing activity.
I spent a couple of years torn between the massive market for bulk scanning and the time it takes to scan. So I sympathise with those who ask if there's a better way than a flatbed scanner. If you have more than a handful of snaps, regardless of how much time you have on your hands, scanning one by one will drive you out of your mind.
Like me, you'll hit upon document scanners. Maybe, you'll say to yourself, this is the answer to bulk photo scanning. Well it's not. Photos aren't documents, and I'll explain why. First, most text is produced on rather flimsy paper (compared to the light card photos are printed on). 80 gsm paper bends nicely so look closely at the paper path a document scanner imposes and check that those priceless family snaps will bend that way. Chances are they will not. That excludes several products from people such as Epson.
Second there's so much more data on a photo compared with a sheet of A4. Yes, I know these days people slip in charts and graphs in their documents but for most of the time the scanner only needs to deal accurately with black and white. By contrast an image spans millions of colours, if you don't get them accurately your scan is worthless. From personal experience I can tell you document scanners just can't capture large amounts of colour accurately.
Thirdly, text dots don't match photo dpi. Look at the spec of a scanner - if its pitched at text chances are it will do a respectable job at low resolution. OCR is that good. Same resolution on a photo is just a disaster. Even when you up the published resolution you'll find a document scanner rated at 300 dpi will not match a photo scanner at the same resolution.
When we set up our free photo scanningg service we needed to get speed along with quality. Save yourself the bother of checking, there's only one game in town and that's Kodak. A straight paper path, reliable feeder unit, high resolution, special software just for photo scanning, they have the range of products which will address the unique demands of batch photo scanning.
I spent a couple of years torn between the massive market for bulk scanning and the time it takes to scan. So I sympathise with those who ask if there's a better way than a flatbed scanner. If you have more than a handful of snaps, regardless of how much time you have on your hands, scanning one by one will drive you out of your mind.
Like me, you'll hit upon document scanners. Maybe, you'll say to yourself, this is the answer to bulk photo scanning. Well it's not. Photos aren't documents, and I'll explain why. First, most text is produced on rather flimsy paper (compared to the light card photos are printed on). 80 gsm paper bends nicely so look closely at the paper path a document scanner imposes and check that those priceless family snaps will bend that way. Chances are they will not. That excludes several products from people such as Epson.
Second there's so much more data on a photo compared with a sheet of A4. Yes, I know these days people slip in charts and graphs in their documents but for most of the time the scanner only needs to deal accurately with black and white. By contrast an image spans millions of colours, if you don't get them accurately your scan is worthless. From personal experience I can tell you document scanners just can't capture large amounts of colour accurately.
Thirdly, text dots don't match photo dpi. Look at the spec of a scanner - if its pitched at text chances are it will do a respectable job at low resolution. OCR is that good. Same resolution on a photo is just a disaster. Even when you up the published resolution you'll find a document scanner rated at 300 dpi will not match a photo scanner at the same resolution.
When we set up our free photo scanningg service we needed to get speed along with quality. Save yourself the bother of checking, there's only one game in town and that's Kodak. A straight paper path, reliable feeder unit, high resolution, special software just for photo scanning, they have the range of products which will address the unique demands of batch photo scanning.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Photobooks? Photo books? Whatever - they're yours.
One of the most popular applications of the photos we scan is creating photobooks. So just over a year ago we set up a link to enable our clients to download software to create and then print photobooks (or is it photo books?). The service was popular, so this year we wanted to continue to offer the service with an even better supplier.
So we set about location a new supplier, and we found one, in photobox. We've used them before for great prints from scans, and they're one of the suppliers we offer via our free photo scanning service. We, and our clients, just love the quality of the photos they print, and their speed of delivery. As an added bonus they offer a wide range of other photo gifts too.
More about our photo books - take a look.
Jeff Underwood
1Scan.co.uk
So we set about location a new supplier, and we found one, in photobox. We've used them before for great prints from scans, and they're one of the suppliers we offer via our free photo scanning service. We, and our clients, just love the quality of the photos they print, and their speed of delivery. As an added bonus they offer a wide range of other photo gifts too.
More about our photo books - take a look.
Jeff Underwood
1Scan.co.uk
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)