NiallOK’s Blog

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Funny how when eircom suffer, they make sure they don’t suffer alone…

Yesterday, eircom’s connection to the UK went bang for some reason, so they temporarily started using Cable & Wireless as their upstream provider. You can imagine what a sudden surge of demand this put on the C&W network, and what it did to users of ISP’s who already used C&W as their upstream provider (such as my own ISP, Net1.ie) - i.e.: totally smashed their bandwidth. My connection speed went from a healthy 3.76Mbps down to an insufferable rate of slowness which hovered between 0 and 300Kbps, jumping erratically by the second. It’s back to normal now, anyway, but it’s annoying how eircom’s problems tend to affect more than just eircom and thier customers…

In other news, as I turn 30 on Saturday coming, and as I think I’m getting a digital camera for my present from the missus (and an 8.2MP HP R927 at that!), I’m glad to read that it seems that megapixels just don’t matter any more. David Pogue, technology writer for the New York Times writes:

We blew up a photograph to 16 x 24 inches at a professional photo lab. One print had 13-megapixel resolution; one had 8; the third had 5. Same exact photo, down-rezzed twice, all three printed at the same poster size. I wanted to hang them all on a wall in Times Square and challenge passersby to see if they could tell the difference… About 95 percent of the volunteers gave up, announcing that there was no possible way to tell the difference, even when mashing their faces right up against the prints. Only one person correctly ranked the prints in megapixel order, although (a) she was a photography professor, and (b) I believe she just got lucky.

Makes for interesting reading, - especially considering that I run a photo lab… I guess I can use that article for something… convince more people to print bigger canvases I guess. It is, of course, a slightly flawed argument. More megapixels ARE better… but that depends entirely on what you’re using it for - what size you’re printing. He should have taken the three photos with three different cameras instead of taking a 13MP photo and resizing it down in software, for a more accurate set of results. However, in the lab, I have printed 8×12’s, for example, from a photo taken on a 3.2MP camera and the results were fine to the eye. Horses for courses and all that…

By the way, don’t preach to me about any failings the hp Photosmart R927 (the birthday pressie my missus got me) may have. I like it. Full stop.