Today, a lady came up to my counter and asked if we could take the file from a floppy and make an 8x10 print from it. My co worker put the disk into the Picture Maker and went through the pre printing steps. The machine said the biggest print it wanted to do from the file was a wallet size. At this point, I took over the job, as my associate had some trepidations about the whole thing. I told her that the file was too small to make the print size she wanted. She said she wanted an 8x10, not a wallet. I asked her how big the file was (the Kodak machine doesn't go into those sorts of detail). She didn't know. I asked her if she knew the pixel dimensions. No go there either. All she knew was that the thing had been emailed to her, it looked nice on her computer screen and she wanted an 8x10 of it. She also knew that the guy who took the picture had a really good digital camera. Since it's not my money, I made the 8x10. It was a picture of 2 people in front of a sign (you would have to be a realtor to appreciate it, I think). The faces were about 40 pixels each.......
She wasn't happy at all, and decided to take the job to someplace that would do a "better job" of it. I thought of an old adage that if all you have is a hammer, you try to make everthing into a nail, though I don't know why. I suspect that what was going through my head was that if all you know is computers, you will try to do everything with a computer. I also had a conversation with a fellow today who had just returned from the UK. He had gone to retrieve his son, and had taken some pictures with his Sony digital camera. He wanted to know if we could make prints, and what he needed to bring us. I asked how many megapixels the camera was. He thought it was 3 MP. I asked how big the files were. He didn't know, but he knew he had about 70 pictures on the 32mb card. I sent him to one of our other stores...... These sorts of incidents are happening more and more frequently. It's funny, really. I never have had these problems with film users. The image capture was always good enough with film. Now, all of a sudden, there are all these stupid people out there figuring that since it's "digital" it must be wonderful. For some reason, it's the lab's fault that we can't make a good print from too small digital file. For some reason, I think that consumer digital is going to fall flat on it's face. Most people are just too stupid to figure things out, and when they start getting consistently bad results from ther new digitoys, they will probably go back to what they know works, which is film. We went through something similar with video cameras in the 80's. A lot of people bought em, but a year later, they were back to shooting film again, and the Sony TR8's were in the back of the closet. William Robb
