Backscenes

None that I know of, and it's a great pity if she has ceased trading, as I was intending ordering from her shortly. I guess that it's a fairly low-volume operation, and was certainly not low cost. Having said that, a digital camera combined with Microsoft Word will produce results (of a sort in my case I might add!!!)

So will paint and some brushes. :-)

-- Cheers

Roger T.

Home of the Great Eastern Railway

It's not as easy as you might think though. I have tried taking multiple photos and printing them to use as a back-scene, but various optical effects make the joins clumsy and the perspective is all wrong for anything more than a couple of shots.

I've been on the lookout for a row of terrace backs that I could photograph individually and string together as a back-scene, but so far, I haven't found a suitable place.

Perhaps the answer is to do it from a train! - if you can find one where the windows can be opened.

Adrian

Download a copy of Photo stitch This will make panoramas from a series of photos Best overlap by a third at the taking stage. As your unlikely to be able to print a 5 ft by 11" print your going to need to slice it up in to A4 sheets.

Ah they seam to have dropped the Free edition But there is one on this months PC Adviser from Serif (actually the same one under licence)

If anybody is interested I have the ablity to produce similar backscenes from your own images. Get in touch and we might be able to sort something out.

Rich

Use Irfanview, not MS Word. (Google it.) It's free, you can resize pictures easily, and even doctor colour, brightness etc to some extent, and it prints pictures much more nicely than MS Word. If you are willing to spend some real cash, try Adobe's Photoshop Elements. About 1/4 the price of Photoshop, but does about 80% of what Photoshop can do -- which is more than you will likely ever want to do. If you use Irfanview, send its author a donation. He's constantly upgrading the program. It's the best image viewer bar none IMO, and its moderate image processing capabilities are more than adequate for fixing up the odd problem such as red eye or underexposure when you forget that the flash doesn't reach much beyond 3m.

For printed backscenes from photos, try Backdrop Warehouse in the USA. (Google 'em.) They will use your photos to custom print a backscene for you. I've noticed they now have some European scenes, so they may have something suitable. Pricey, though.

Final thought: if you do decide to print your own backscenes, avoid the cheap ink-jets. Those "free" ones. Pay some real money for a multi-tank Canon or Epson, and be happy. A printer is a tool - you can't do good work with bad tools.

HTH

Isn't there an option in PowerPoint to not print the background? Id there isn't, there jolly well ought to be.

A lot of printer manufacturers ? nay, I would suggest all of the major brands. Printers are usually sold to resellers at the manufacturers cost price (or pretty darn close) - as you inferred, there is very little margin in the printers themselves. The mark-up is definitely in the replacement ink. There are some pros and cons obviously - it now costs relatively little to upgrade the hardware every 18 months or so (if you want to have the latest and greatest); and especially so if you wait till almost the end of a product run and then upgrade to the then top of the line model - you can save a lot of money on the hardware that way. I did this with my Pixma i8500 and saved a bundle.

And as some one else has suggested the more separate ink tanks the better (generally) - you only need to replace the ones that have run out.

To save money on ink - keep an eye out for catalogue sales - one large retailer here (Australia) frequently has 15%-20% off ink sales so I usually buy all 8 tanks in one go even if I don't really need them at the time. I have also bought sets of genuine ink on the internet - these tend to be consistently cheaper than shop bought ones - but you need to consider shipping costs of course. What about compatible ink ? Personally I stay away from them - I had one bad experience with them with a previous printer. On the otherhand, one of the printers at work which is used 16 hours a day for B/W printing uses compatible ink tanks with no discernible issues.

With all printers though the more you use them the better the image will be - the heads stay cleaner. Sod's law though, the more you use them the more ink you need to buy !

Sorry for digressing. Will stop now. Cheers Mal

Since I didn't use my inkjet very often, if I didn't remember to run a test page instead the heads were always clogging up. I finally gave up and bought a laser. I couldn't afford color, but most of what printing I do doesn't need color.

My advice to anyone with infrequent printing requirements would be to get a laser.

B&W lasers are in the same price range as decent inkjets; colour lasers cost about what inkjets did 10 years ago.

MartinS said the following on 21/08/2006 04:03:

A good brand second hand is even cheaper. Over a year ago I bought an old HP Laserjet 4M+ from a local seller on eBay for £23. Over a year later, and at least a full box of paper later (2500 sheets or more) it's still going strong on the original toner cartridge that came with it. That's a good deal, and has saved me a fortune in inkjet cartridges.

In message , Graham Thurlwell writes

Let that be a lesson to you. Always RTFM first!

Thats very good advice unless you need to print it first.

Simon

They're certainly cheaper on a per page basis, but you're comparing monochrome with colour. Dunno about cost of supplies for colour lasers.

One of the inkjet printer makers advertises that you can make your own colour prints for 29 cents (Cdn) each. Heck, I send mine to Wal-Mart via internet and pick them up an hour later printed on Kodak paper by a proper photo machine, for 19 cents each! Why would I want to print my own?

You have a valid point there!

It's like those programs that give you instructions on how to install them, but only after you've installed them.

Heh! What manual? All I got was a CD in a case. ;-)

Stupidest thing I've seen recently was the key code for Silent Hunter III. It was printed on the actual DVD and wasn't repeated on anything else. A little inconvenient!