I've just been caught rasterbating

[Britman]

I think this is brilliant. It's called the Rasterbator and what it does is turn an image into lots of larger sections, when put back together it becomes a huge picture. Uses A4, so depending on how you scale you picture when loading you can end up with 20+ sheets.

The Rasterbator

[Matt]

We have rolled it out accross the school, cacking bit of software, if a bit of an unfortunate name, staff did ask if we could change the name...

[kimpossible]

Ring Ring


Ring Ring


"Hello this is year 2004 calling...."

[HappyRabbit]

I think this is brilliant. It's called the Rasterbator and what it does is turn an image into lots of larger sections, when put back together it becomes a huge picture. Uses A4, so depending on how you scale you picture when loading you can end up with 20+ sheets.
The Rasterbator

  Rasterbator is great, I like it! It creates images from large dots. It is an interesting art technic, but when I need to print exact enlarged image, I use this #snip#.

[Rosco]

I think this is brilliant. It's called the Rasterbator and what it does is turn an image into lots of larger sections, when put back together it becomes a huge picture. Uses A4, so depending on how you scale you picture when loading you can end up with 20+ sheets.
The Rasterbator

  Rasterbator is great, I like it! It creates images from large dots. It is an interesting art technic, but when I need to print exact enlarged image, I use this #snip#.

do ye, aye?  

[robwhizz]

Looks interesting, but can it account for printer margins so you can trim the paper? Most of the gallery shots have white grids.

InDesign can do the same thing and I've used it a few times for multipage spreads. I find it's a bit of a pain to set up the overlap though, so I'll definitely give this a go and see how it works out.

[net-curtains]

To me the results look a bit crap, makes every thing look like it's behind a cage.

It'd be easier and cheaper, and you'd get much better quality if you just took (or sent) an image file to a company that does large format printing.

Gimmick.

[robwhizz]

Ah, I see now. It's prints a half-tone pattern. I thought it just scaled the image to cover multiple pages.

And as it produces a pdf, you can easily set to print to printer margins and then trim for a seamless tile.

To me the results look a bit crap, makes every thing look like it's behind a cage.

It'd be easier and cheaper, and you'd get much better quality if you just took (or sent) an image file to a company that does large format printing.

Gimmick.

I know where you are coming from, and in many circumstances I agree.

Although, many years back I produced a design for a hoarding at a football stadium to advertise a company. The printing company said it wouldn't work viewed from a distance and was too risky. Boss agreed, so my design was never used.
If this program was about back then (and cheap colour laser printers) I could have knocked up a full scale version and proved my design. (that said, InDesign would have done an even better job if it was available back then, but it would have used more toner).

I think for things like schools producing big banners for events, and cheap company promotional posters etc, kids bedrooms etc. it's not a bad solution.

[net-curtains]

Ah, I see now. It's prints a half-tone pattern. I thought it just scaled the image to cover multiple pages.

And as it produces a pdf, you can easily set to print to printer margins and then trim for a seamless tile.

To me the results look a bit crap, makes every thing look like it's behind a cage.

It'd be easier and cheaper, and you'd get much better quality if you just took (or sent) an image file to a company that does large format printing.

Gimmick.

I know where you are coming from, and in many circumstances I agree.

Although, many years back I produced a design for a hoarding at a football stadium to advertise a company. The printing company said it wouldn't work viewed from a distance and was too risky. Boss agreed, so my design was never used.
If this program was about back then (and cheap colour laser printers) I could have knocked up a full scale version and proved my design. (that said, InDesign would have done an even better job if it was available back then, but it would have used more toner).

I think for things like schools producing big banners for events, and cheap company promotional posters etc, kids bedrooms etc. it's not a bad solution.

I had to do this sort of thing quite a lot with print work years ago, we used Quark and fiddled with the settings on the printer, so I guess it saves a bit of time with the set up, and the halftone pattern is a nice effect if you like that sort of thing.

I'm sure it's great fun, but personally I wouldn't spend loads of time and money printing out a load of sheets and sticking them together if I wanted a large format print for the wall, I'd get a decent version printed up. Bearing in mind the cartridges in my colour laser cost nearly a hundred quid each, and there's four of them, I'll give it a miss!

I think if you add up the cost of toner and compare it with the cost of getting one printed professionally there's probably not a lot in it, and the results couldn't be more different.

[Britman]

I love it when an old post get resurrected all Zombie like.
I don't think this thing is for professional standard printing move quick testing and school projects.

[robwhizz]

Bearing in mind the cartridges in my colour laser cost nearly a hundred quid each, and there's four of them, I'll give it a miss!

I think if you add up the cost of toner and compare it with the cost of getting one printed professionally there's probably not a lot in it, and the results couldn't be more different.

Going completely off topic, but when we got our HP Colour Laser toner was about £50 per colour. Within 12 months it was touching £100 (robbing b*stards), so I had no choice to explore compatibles again (had problems in the past with quality etc. and swore never to use them again. Pleasantly surprised this time round though. They were very good and half the price).

Anyway, a Viking Direct catalogue hit the door mat yesterday with big reductions in toner. For my HP (2600n) a 4-colour set was only £215. Not too bad.

[net-curtains]

Going completely off topic, but when we got our HP Colour Laser toner was about £50 per colour. Within 12 months it was touching £100 (robbing b*stards)

We've got a £400 HP colour laser sitting in the shed that's unusable as it says the yellow toner has run out. I could spend over £100 replacing the cartridge, but as it's only been used for black printing I find this all a bit suspect. I understand there might have been a CMYK mix to produce the black (completely unnecessary but there you go) but even so it shouldn't have used that much yellow.

So bearing in mind that we could waste £100 and not fix the problem, or spend £100 and watch the other colour warnings light up one by one we decided not to bother. Or we could spend £400 on toner and find it's a hardware fault. We're also extremely miffed that the printer stops printing altogether when one colour is low. We only need it for black, there's loads of black in the toner, but it won't let us print.

So instead we bought a b/w HP for £40 which has been used daily for about 2 years now. I think the replacement cartridge is about a tenner.

I think what I've learned over the years is not to spend too much money on a home/office printer. It works out much cheaper to take occasional colour stuff to the local print shop and buy a cheap as chips b/w for office documents.