[photo-3d] Re: Question for newsletter editors - pdf picture quality

["Robert Brand" <rb@xxxxxxxxxx>]

--- In photo-3d@xxxxxxxxxxx, "Tom Deering" <photo-3d@xxxx> wrote:
> 

> If your newsletter is indeed "photo-rich" and your "one-shot 
download" is acceptable to most, 
> then I suspect that you are only reaching cable-modem users, or 
people with a T1 line.  The 
> average person on a modem will not want to wait for an hour or two 
to get his email.  In fact, a 
> multi-megabyte email would whack some people's system altogether.
> 
> What percent of your subscribers get the newsletter this way, and 
what is the size of the email 
> attachment?

Tom,

I am happy to continue this off-line and would absolutely enjoy the 
comments. In the interim here are my comments.

You are certainly a person who has the interests of the end user at 
heart and I agree that we have to try and make things as painless as 
possible but that also means that I should not just be spending all 
my time working on the very large club site. Like other things in 
life, it is a compromise. Your own web site sensibly states you don't 
rely on it to make money. I agree with your implied statement in that 
we are not able to be perfectionists in everything (or in fact 
anything) that we do - you can't please everyone.

In doing my best and still keeping sane (I hope), I have decided that 
not using email is a better option in the first place. As you 
undoubtedly know MIME takes twice as much time (and maybe far longer) 
to send than a http download. As the high resolution pdf files are 
only about 50% bigger and using http cuts the time in half, the 
saving is obvious. A better production that downloads faster. I also 
stated that you could put both a high res and low res copy on line. 
The low res will zip through when downloaded.

As for having the magazine on a web page with thumbnails, an obvious 
thought crosses my mind. By the time that you download the text file, 
read the material and decide what you need in high resolution, then 
find it again and download the individual images, you have taken 
somewhat longer than the few minutes that a half meg download should 
take on even a 33k modem. To top this off you have an incomplete 
record. Nothing worse than deciding that a 2 year old article is now 
of interest and then finding that the pictures are not necessarily on 
line anymore. (e.g. site size limitations).

As I said before, happy to continue off-line for those that are 
interested in magazines issues. I would suggest that we could use the 
SSCC Forum at www.sscc.asn.au/sscc/ to continue this discussion. I 
will post some details there if anyone is interested.

Robert Brand
SSCC Web Manager