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[meppi]

We've always stated that we were going to use scan sizes that gave us the best compromise between size and resolution depending on the progress of the hardware used to read these magazines on.

This was one of the major reasons why we went with 2 different versions of our magazines. One for portable devices and a second one for home systems.

Well for the past couple of months rumors have been circulating that the new iPad 3 will have a resolution of 2048 x 1536, which means that in landscape mode our standard 1920pixel scans would not even fill the width of the screen without stretching the images.

in the meanwhile hardware and storage solutions for home systems have been improving drastically over the past couple of years.
For instance, a 2TB HDD can now be found for a very modest price, which goes a long way in negating the storage space problem of years gone by.

More rumors are circulating about the next set of Macbook Pro's having HiDPI screens which would up the resolution considerably.
And we all know that others are bound to follow suit ones such a step is made.

So my question now is, where does this leave us?

I personally feel that it might be time to take the final step and release magazines at their near maximum resolution.
100% resolution isn't quite possible due to them having to be edited after scanning, so you always lose 50 pixels or so, but that's nothing to worry about.

What this would mean is that most issues would jump from 1920p to probably 2560p.
This would mean that a single issue would go from 150-200MB to 200-300MB depending on the number of pages as well as the design of the pages.
Which all in all isn't a huge deal when seeing the jump in resolution.

The portable version could also be bumped up from 1024p to 1600p or so, which would increase the size a bit, but also would give the additional option of zooming in on the pages to see the smaller detail.


All of this of course depends on what you, our visitors want.
I fully understand that not everyone uses the forum, or even reads it as the focus has always been on the site itself from the very start.
But we certainly would appreciate any input we get on these ideas, so we can make future decisions with such feedback in mind.

[KiwiArcader]

While I don't have a problem with retaining full resolution pages .... It means one less step by not having to resize pages after all .... One wonders whether it is overkill considering the iPad screen is only 9.7". The small size negates the benefits of the resolution as far as I am concerned so the only real benefit to the resolution comes with zooming the image.

[meppi]

Well, that's why we would keep a portable format as well since 2560p files might be a bit much for such a small screen.
But bumping up the portable format from 1024 to 1600 would do quite a bit for image quality, as we've talked about before.

In the end, people would still have the option to use the max res files on their iPad3 for instance, or go with the much more manageable 1600 ones, while having the absolute best image possible on their home systems.

[KiwiArcader]

Always interesting having these conversations with you as anything that helps retain quality for future generations of hardware should be considered.

So my first issue back from holiday of NGC Magazine is now available in full resolution (approx 2700 x XXXX) as a bit of a test to see if it generates any negative or even positive comments. A little bit of compression has been applied which keeps the file size to around 200MB per issue and it looks good. The good thing with this approach is if anyone does want to play around with the magazine the pages are in the size that they were originally scanned at so not dealing with anything related to dpi or resolution reduction etc.

[meppi]

The only thing that worries me hearing that is how much the compression negates the quality that higher resolution scans are meant to produce.

My first couple of magazines I redid are taken from the original, fully edited lossless PSD files to maximize the quality at all times end up being 350-390MB per 100 pages.
This will differ from magazine to magazine since the dimensions of publications varies a lot.
This one was at 2560, so it frightens me a bit to see a 2700 scan being sized down to half of the size of a 2560 one to be honest.

[KiwiArcader]

I normally apply a compression level of 10 in Paintshop when creating my mags. I increased this to 15, a fairly small change, to keep the mag in the 200mb range. To my eyes the difference because of the compression are negligible.