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Apparently scans come to this website from a variety of generous folks. Problem for me is that some have very little detail so that the text can be extremely hard to read, or even be unreadable. Part of this is caused by low resolution, part by excessive compression when the scans are made into jpgs.

Can I suggest a minimumof 200 dpi at the original image size? 300 would be that much better. If you have control of the degree of compression when you make the jpg files, a setting of 35-40 in my photoshop gives good quality without excessive compression artifacts. Medium quality is often in that range.

I assume that these days bandwidth or storage is no longer the issue it once was. Much as I like the pictures, I also like to be able to easily read the copy and revel in the language considered appropriate in each era......

Obviously there will be 30 profound opinions on this per 20 members, all of them different. 300 dpi is often considered a standard for printing, with 72 dpi for web also being common. If we start with print capability we can always cut down; it's considerably harder to go the other way.

Thanks!

Agree completely but don't really have a good solution to offer. Maybe Kev can suggest something and anything I contributed, would be willing to scan again at a higher res.

When a lot of the earlier items were scanned there was (and still is) the issue of those considerable number of people on low speed dialup access. A lot of the files were in the several meg range which can take hours to download for them.

Kev has managed to split many of the earlier items to single chapters or pieces to help that situation so only a single item need be downloaded, but other things just can't be split easily and are huge even at lower res.

All good points Howard.

It all comes down to economics and what is best for the majority of users. While the Photo Archive is limited to about 1600 x 1600 for image uploads, the Literature and Manuals section is not, so we can have much larger PDF files in there. Typically the brochures have been scanned as pdf at actual size, while most of the adverts are scanned as 1600x1600 images for web display.

The other thing to be aware of is that while hard-drive storage on your home computer is cheap. It is not cheap when you are renting high-availability web-server space. There's a big difference between those $7.95 a month "unlimited" space websites that are advertised and have limited connections and real dedicated web server storage space that has high bandwidth availability that is $100+ dollars a month. This website is in the later, and is all funded out of my pocket and the unsolicited cash donations I received. There is no club, or organization behind the scenes funding the website. I've had to upgrade the service every year for the last 4 years as we have grown.

Currently we have about 12gigs of content stored in compressed PDFs and images here on the website. Uncompressed and at 300 dpi, that would balloon to almost 100gigs. Consider you need about 2.5x your current storage volume for website overhead and backup. So that much space web-server space on a dedicated high-availability server would end up costing me over $250 a month for hosting. It all about paying for a space on website server rack, in a data center, with high speed trunk lines coming into it, and the staff at the data center to monitor and fix hardware and communication problems. All that comes at a price. So until I win the lotto, the website will have to live within its means.

Wish I could offer you what you want.

Understand. In an ideal world.....

Another good reason to throw some bucks in the kitty for Kev. If you see this as a free board, you are shirking your responsibility.....

i wish there was a way to utilize the equipment i have for sale on ebay. 2.5 terabytes would be great for the site, just be a matter of who's going to rack it, pay to power it, etc...and the cost of the static IP.....so yeah. probably wouldn't work out. if i had a cold room at my house and the money to pay the electric bill on it...i'd host it up w/ both powervaults running too.


so, yeah in an ideal world......

about the only thing i can contribute to this site is the vast info and pictures i upload for people to utilize. i try to help as much as i am given help, even more if i can. but being a novice....i can't really help all the time, so i just do my best to take really detailed step by step photos on my blog.

Kev, one of these days i'll have expendable income to donate. i'm sorry dude.

Hank