Digital Photography of Plants and subsequent manipulation
Antennaria@aol.com (Thu, 19 Dec 2002 20:13:23 PST)

"John Lonsdale" writes:

Hello John and PBS'rs, in answer to the issue of built-in flash card readers
on printers these days, I assure your that they are quite effective. It is
true that such features are marketed towards computer "newbies" who know
nothing about how to handle images from a digital camera, but in fact, the
built-in flash card readers and adjunct software behaves exactly as a
stand-alone card reader device. The communication is flexible and
bi-directional. Your options are the following:

1. Insert the digital camera flash card into the printer, and then use goofy
options and buttons on the printer to send the pictures directly to the
printer. This is for people who are completely new to computing. Needless
to say, this feature is never used here, nor by anyone even slightly familiar
with the technology.

2. Insert the digital camera flash card into the printer, then use Windows
Explorer. The HP printer-driver software automatically installs and maps a
drive-letter to the flash card slots (becomes my F: drive on my computer).
Preview, copy-&-paste, or delete images from the flash card directly from the
computer, just as you would from any media.

3. Insert the digital camera flash card into the printer, then use the
buttons on the printer to select all images, press the "Save" button on the
face of the printer, and it launches HP software on the computer, asking
where you want to download the photos on your hard drive! How convenient! I
once used option #2 all the time, now I use this even faster option to
quickly have the printer/flash-card communicate and download to my computer's
hard drive.

The printer can connect to the PC via the USB port or the Parallel port, the
USB port obviously faster than the much slower Parallel port option. But
John is right, it's a small price (about $45) for a state-of-the-art card
reader that's up to 40 times faster than a standard USB device, certainly
"short dollars" and adviseable. For me, the built-in capabilities in the
inexpensive printer was the best "perk" I've seen in recent years of
purchasing equipment, and I'll gratefully tolerate the slower download speed
for the time being.

I didn't mean to imply using high resolution TIFF format regularly when
taking pictures. John correctly points out the downsides: large format size
and slow disk-write speed. The middle ground is to use best quality JPG
format. When you edit and prep the images for the web, certainly turn on a
reasonable file compression to make the images load quickly, finding the
right balance of compression without sacrificing image quality... my
threshold is 30% compression afterwhich I sense image degradation. However,
if you need to print images, either use TIFFs, or use JPG files without
compression (maximum quality JPG). A JPG image with 30% compression is
guaranteed to print with odd pixel distortions and "artifacts", but the same
file prints adequately when compression is turned off or set to a minimum,
and resaved to a printable alternative JPG file.

"Elizabeth Waterman"

Oh, I'm glad you brought that up. Yes indeed, Irfanview is an excellent,
very speedy, feature-rich, well-implemented shareware program (nominal cost
for business use, about $25), and comes highly recommended!!! It's a capable
tool for cataloging images as well. The only thing I don't like about it is
it's odd name.

Mark McDonough Pepperell, Massachusetts, United States
antennaria@aol.com "New England" USDA Zone 5
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