So Confused - Only Scan up to 300 DPI?!?

Ok. Need some major help and guidance please. It is 2018, right? I've been reading a lot of the posts under scanning and most recommend only scanning images at a DPI rate of 300. Looking up the resoutions, a 4x5 inch picture would result in a pixel count of 1200 x 1500 for a decent quality scan.

But we are in the beginning stages of 8K TVs/Monitors now, with a 7,680 x 4320 pixel resolution, and 16K (being talked about even before 8K has a chance to gain ground) 15,360 x 8640 pixel resolution.

How many people out there are actually scanning these photos at 300 DPI with the intent to print them? And if you ever wanted to print a poster size image of a 4x5 picture, wouldn't you want to do it from a scan larger than the 300 DPI rate? Or to be seen on a 4K monitor or larger?

Would we all not benefit from scanning at higher rates? Is it not up to us to preserve all these gorgeous women for future reference? These magazines are perishable and I don't think the originals for a lot of the posts on this site, would ever be made available to us, except at large expense that most of us could not afford.

I've been scanning a lot of my older magazines anywhere from 1200 DPI to 3200 DPI depending on the size of the image. I save them in TIFF format (some turn out as large 850MBs)and yes it takes up a lot of HD space, but HD space is getting cheaper as the years go by, so no big deal. Zooming in on the pictures has amazing clarity. I don't have a problem converting them to JPG to share but most, when converted, are still larger than 20MBs.

Then the issue becomes how and where to upload these large files for access, and if anyone on this forum is at all interested in them, since I am very eager to share all that I have done so far.

Maybe I am just way off base in my thinking and need a little guidance in the right direction. Thank you all ahead of time for any thoughts on this. Thank you for such an awesome forum, as well! Hopefully, I am posting this in the right section.

[Pepper II]

The reason most of us scan at 300 dpi is most vintage magazines won't render a better image at higher resolution scan settings. This is due to the pixel count of the original printed image. The other consideration is some members have limited download speeds and restrictive total download allotments each month. So it would not be fair to penalize them with huge image sizes they would not be able to take advantage of. I try to keep each image I scan and post at about 1 mb; this seems to be a good compromise. At least this is how I see it.

[buttsie]

Not to mention adult imagehosts not that long ago only allowed 3-5mb maximum per image

Even now most are 10mb or below

2 are at 16mb-20mb

alternate hosts
http://vintage-erotica-forum.com/t33...ate-hosts.html


Anything larger than that and your most likely paying to keep it alive

Even the non-adult hosts have limitations...Photo bucket recently nobbling 3rd party postings for free users a case in point unless they upgraded to premium

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...aring_websites

Yes, I did find a couple of the sites that hosted up to 20MB, so at least that's a step in the right direction. If I have some time and any scans below 20MB, I'll give it a try and post back with a link so that other viewers can check them out.

For now I will just have to be content to continue scanning the way I have and storing the files personally. Someday, when I'm long gone and the world of holography has reached what it is in the movies, maybe these scans will come in handy for someone.

[buttsie]

You could combine scans up to 20mb with an imagehost

the larger version / versions in a filehost link

Mediafire has one requirement - you sign-in every 3 months to keep account active

[seany65]

A high resolution scan of a magazine photo will show the dots that the photos in the magazine are made up of, so you have 3 choices:

1) Scan at the high resolution and 'put up with' the dots on the computer screen or print out very big versions of the photos.

2) Scan at such a resolution that the scanning dots are bigger than the photo dots so that they don't show up. This often means a fairly poor image quality.

3) Scan at a high resolution but make sure that the output image size is less than the size it would otherwise be. eg. I recently did some Satinder scans at 1200dpi, this meant the pics would be far bigger than the originals and the files over several hundreds mb, I shrank the output image size to 25% as I only wanted them to be 1000 pixels high for my monitor. I know this is a height size that my printer will put out without automatically shrinking/enlarging them when printed on A4 paper.

Thank you, seany65, for the input. I understand what you are saying. I am not, nor have any intent on ever printing to paper. Takes up too much space and I am trying to reduce space. In fact I have been scanning the photos and then shredding the magazines and taking them to recycling, since it's too much effort to try and sell them. So viewing on a monitor, TV, tablet is were will I ever look at the photos.

I found a site (photoland.io) that let me create a free account and it seems that the upload size is limited to 100MB size files. I created an album (VEF Test) with the following contents:

2 - higher DPI rate pics (Randi Brooks & Vanessa Llyn) taken from a shot of my 46" Samsung TV.

1 - 300DPI scan (roxanne loupe 7b.jpg)
1 - PNG showing the Image Size info (roxanne loupe 07b image size)
1 - PNG showing the Quality Saved As info (roxanne loupe 07b quality)

1 - 2400DPI scan (roxanne loupe 07a.jpg)
1 - PNG showing the Image Size info (roxanne loupe 07a image size)
1 - PNG showing the Quality Saved As info (roxanne loupe 07a quality)

Here is the link to the album, if anyone wants to see what I am referencing:

https://photoland.io/a/B4lb

If you zoom in on the 300DPI pic (mimicking the stretching to fill a larger monitor) it pixelizes, whereas the 2400DPI pic has a large deal of latitude till it begins to pixelate.

Why scale for a current monitor size when we should be preserving these pics with the thought of larger scale monitors/TVs in our (near) fututre? Unless one is going to rescan everything later. My computer utilizes a 27" monitor and I find it small to look at, so I will get something larger in the near future, especially since my eyesight isn't what it once was.

Just trying to understand the logic for not scanning larger. There are a lot of great photos on this website that we will never see in larger format, ie:

http://vintage-erotica-forum.com/sho...77&postcount=1

Probably scanned years ago when this was good enough?

I'm not criticizing, just trying to point out that we are taking so much time to preserve these photos that shouldn't we be scanning the best that we can so that in years to come we don't go back to the link above and wish it had been scanned better?

Again, maybe I am just way off base in my thinking. I just thought that this website was made with the intent on preserving to the best of our abilities and sharing with each member the beautiful women of the world.

Thank you all for your thoughts and I continue to be enlightened with each response.

[halvar]

Time and effort is the most valuable thing spent while scanning. So if you invest time, make sure to get the best quality.

And: Store, archive and backup your scans in a compressed, lossless long term format. Choose a format where your grand kids will probably have a tool to read. TIFF is a good choice for this.

If you keep the original scans you can always create new derivatives for sharing or color optimizations.

But: The amount of information on the source material is limited. If the source is printed in 150dpi it makes little sense to scan with 1200dpi. It is different for real photos. Real photos have a much higher resolution.

I have two 23.8 inch 4k displays here. I displayed the images 7a and 7b on the monitors and made a screen shot. The screenshot is stored as png (16.4 MB, lossless):

The left image was scaled down to 20% and the right scaled up to 170% to fit them on the screen.

I cut out details from the two images (3.4MB)


I cannot spot much difference, but my eyes are not the best. I always joke: Before I buy a 4K TV I should get glasses. That would improve the perceived quality of my HD-TV.

Glasses have helped me immensely!!


Thank you and the rest of the guys for your input on this. I really appreciate it!!

[Jism Jim]

As others have said, most magazine prints don't justify scanning above 300dpi. IMO your 2400dpi scan proves that, it clearly shows the printing patterns. Who wants to see printing patterns? I don't.
Plus there's time and budget considerations. There was a time I scanned at 150dpi, because 300dpi took offputtingly long with the scanner I used back then. If I had had to scan at 1200dpi, which is the maximum of my current scanner, I would not have been able to post the hundreds of magazines that I have posted. My scanners come from thrift stores, I rather spend my money on new magazines to post.
Plus on higher scan resolutions the descreening doesn't work. At least not with the scanners I have used.

So there are many reasons to limit the scanning resolution to 300dpi, especially when sharing them on a forum. The people who use larger resolutions post little or not at all.