Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/07/02
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Mark Rabiner writes: > The sites out there of commercial / fine art > photography which are not chintzy with the scans > are out there but few and far between. Are they > worrying about the slowness of your modem or are > you going to steal their images do they think? Both, probably. Many people still believe that every site must fit on a 640x480 screen and must use "web-safe" colors, even though the vast majority of displays today are 800x600 with 24-bit color. A lot of galleries also have all sorts of trim and decoration that takes up space on the page, instead of just showing the pictures. Finally, some sites probably do worry about things being stolen, although even a large Web image will look pretty dismal on paper. I especially hate sites where you have to navigate through twenty frames and click on multiple thumbnails to see each and every image--and then the "big" image is still something like 400x200, far too small to even clearly show the composition of the image. As for download speed, it is true that modems are a limiting factor, but so are Web sites. A lot of image galleries are on sites with virtually no bandwidth, and you end up waiting a loooong time to see anything--far longer than would be required by modem delays alone. Overall, this is all very discouraging. It certainly prevents me from buying images from sites like this that are trying to sell them. There is worse, of course ... such as sites that put a visible watermark on every image, as if their images were so precious and valuable that this extreme measure is actually justified (at least they do not lack confidence, eh?).