Re: [photo-3d] stereocard printer possibilities?

[Gabriel Jacob <3-d@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm surprised anyone is still using printers (to make digital prints! ;-)
I have an old Epson 600 ink-jet printer that of course is getting on in
age. I WAS thinking of upgrading it but won't. Why? Several reasons.

First, I haven't seen an ink-jet or color laser printer that is good
enough to stand up to the close scrutiny of magnification under a
3-D viewer. Dye subs do a very good job, but they have a limitation
(see next paragraph).

Second reason is price. Even if I the current printers are good
enough, the price per print  is expensive. Even if this is not a problem,
why bother! You can now get REAL photographic prints from digital
files rather inexpensively.

A lot of companies on the net are offering printing services directly
from your computer. You upload or email your digital files to them
and you get photographic prints back in the mail.  It's almost like
having your own film processor at home!

After Jim Harp reported about these new printers and showed us
some of his amazing work, I started experimenting with them too
and was pleasantly pleased with the quality (there was a cropping
issue to contend with but that is another issue).

I wasn't too happy with the anaglyphs photographic prints I got made.
After I specifically uploaded them as compressed non-lossy images
I got them back and could readily see the tell tale signs of image
compression.  I called them up and found out they convert them to
flash pix which really sucks when your trying to do anaglyphs. So for
the moment, I won't be chucking my good old Epson 600 printer.

My next APEC III exchange will be monolithic 3-digital photographic
prints.  They would have been submitted in the current exchange but
the film processor screwed up on the cropping. Otherwise, the quality
and price is excellent.

Gabriel