I recently bought a Kodak DC260. I love this camera but I am having trouble sizing down the images I send over Email. Most of my friends tell me when they get the photos, they look super magnified. I would like to send a smaller sized photo without compromising image quality. Is there any way to do this?

-- Mark Zuchlewski (zuchlewski@yahoo.com), February 24, 1999

Answers

Like Robert Heinlein wrote: TANSTAAFL! (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch!) No matter what you do to an image to make it smaller, or compress it, you're going to lose something. Methods like Jpeg compression are by nature "lossy", but since they lose information in such a way that you don't notice it up to a point you'll be pretty happy with the results. That said, I'd recommend the following:

1. Resize, reduce, or resample the picture to a smaller size. If your photo is saved with a resolution of 300dpi, and you send it through an email program that displays it onscreen at 72 dpi, the image is going to appear rather large. It's going to display about 4.16 (300/72) X's larger than it normally would. Resize it. You'll lose some information(pixels) but you'll be surprised how good it still manages to look onscreen.

2. Use a higher level of jpeg compression for images that are going to be emailed and only viewed onscreen. If they're not going to print the image at the other end they don't need such a large image file.

3. Experiment with the resizing and compression and simply email yourself a copy of the image to see what your friends will see. This is the easiest way to determine what level of compression and resizing you can live with before sending it to someone else.

The best part of all this is that your friends will probably be thrilled at how much more quickly their email can be downloaded. Those big files can take a long time to send and download.

Good Luck. I hope this helps. If anyone else has any ideas please add them, I like a good hint too. :-)

-- Gerald Payne (gmp@francorp.francomm.com), February 24, 1999.