Print shops and posters

At the end of last year, my wife Isabelle asked me if I could create some postcards for the association she works for. The idea was to have something that can serve both as a greeting card for the new year and an indication that they have recently moved into new offices. After a couple of iterations with POV-Ray and GIMP, I eventually managed to create something that she and her colleagues were happy with. I created a winter scene showing their front door (modelled from photos), some cardboard boxes in front of it and some trees in the background instead of the ugly wall that is there in reality.

Later, she asked me to create some posters showing different versions of this scene. I re-rendered the winter scene at a higher resolution (approx. 3000 * 2000) and I also created a summer scene in which the snow is gone, the grass is greener and there are leaves on the trees. Here are some smaller versions of these images:

winter scene
summer scene

I gave Isabelle a CD-ROM containing these images and she went to the cheapest print shop nearby to get them printed on posters (100 * 70cm). At that size, the resolution of the images is 75dpi. I thought that it would be good enough for a poster that is designed to be viewed from some distance.

Well, it turns out that the employee of that shop discouraged Isabelle from printing the posters because they were not at 300dpi. She claimed that the images would look bad because of the low resolution. On the other hand, she looked at the samples that I had given to my wife (printed on photo paper) and she said that she would not be able to get the same quality on posters. Go figure. Oh, and she also said that her computer could not read that strange PNG format, but fortunately I had also included a JPEG version.

Anyway, she asked for 300dpi so she will get them. For 100 * 70cm, 300dpi means about 12000 * 8000 pixels, for a total of 97 megapixels. I wish I had a camera that could take photos at that resolution. I estimated that re-rendering the image with POV-Ray would take a couple of weeks using my fastest computer (which just died anyway – see my previous entry), so I simply let GIMP scale up the image and I only recreated the parts in which the details could be interesting. In the process, GIMP asked me if I really wanted to create an image that took more than 1 GB. Well, sure, that’s what the shop asked for! I will burn these files on a CD now. I hope that they will not complain that the image is too large for their computer to handle…

Dead PC

Back from vacation. Found that my PC does not want to start anymore. What a nice way to start the new year!

I did not have much time to investigate what died. It could be the motherboard, the CPU, the RAM, the video card or the power supply. In any case, the PC locks up on startup and does not seem to initialize the PCI cards correctly. I am guessing that because I get no video signal and the lights on the network card get stuck in an unusual state, which usually means that the card did not get the proper signals on the PCI bus. Regardless of what it is, it looks like I will have to waste some time finding the bad components and replacing them.

Fortunately, my data should be safe. I learned a lot from the disk crash that I experienced a few years ago just when I was starting my (then irregular) backup on CDs. At that time, that caused me to lose a number of GIMP source files that I was working on, such as a preliminary version of a GIMP macro recorder. Since then, I have started doing automated backups on external USB drives in addition to the less frequent manual backups on CDs. USB enclosures are relatively cheap (about 10 EUR) and buying two hard disks instead of one (or 4 instead of 2) is also cheap in comparison with the value of the data that could be lost.

Even if my main PC will not be usable for the next few days, I can still use the laptop that I got from work. But for how long? I just learned that 2 of my 6 colleagues who had the same model of laptop experienced a hard disk crash in the last two weeks. Another one had a disk crash a few weeks before the Christmas break. And another two lost their data after coming back from vacation due to software problems. So this means that 5 out of 6 had problems with their laptop recently (OK, in two cases this was likely to be a human error, but still…). I am starting to wonder if there is a timebomb built into these laptops. So maybe I am next on the list. I’m going to back up my laptop now…

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