| In November 1999 the German magazin "Lapis"
which is about mineral collecting started a photo contest
with the theme "Mineralientage München"
(Munich Mineral Days) which is the biggest mineral show
in Europe. As I am a exhibitor there and had my MAVICA with me I took some hundred shots on floppy and just for the heck of it sent in some pictures printed out on photo paper (which was done by a professional service). I did not tell the magazine that it is a didital picture. I was just curious to see what happens... But I did not expect that ! When I came back from the family christmas visit in my old hometown, I found a letter telling me that I had won the first prize ! Whow, I could not believe that until I received the January 2000 issue of the magazine where they had printed my picture. Now I will invest my DM 500.- prize money (app. US-$ 250.00) into some photo equipment and mineral books.
Thats a copy of the magazine page.
Thats the Mavica
Picture cropped. If you want to read something about the Munich Show click here ! The original text is only available in German yet, but I included an automatic translation service which produces a sometimes quite funny english text ! Here is the cooking recipe for the digital printout : The specifications of the company producing the printouts on photopaper from digital files recommended an optimum picture size of 1052 x 1501 pixel for a 9 x 13 cm picture (3.5 x 5.1 inches which is app. 300 dpi). So I took my IrfanView programm and resampled the picture to 3002 x 2252 pixel, cropped an area of 3002 x 2104 and after some sharpening and adjusting brightness and contrast a little, resampled that again to 1501 x 1052 pixel size and saved as BMP which was stored on a zip disk which is accepted by the computer terminal at my local supermarket. Voila´after a few days I could pick up my printouts, which are unable to tell from regular photos and sent them in. The printouts cost me app. 50 cents each. Not bad if you receive US-$ 250.00 in return for it.... So, now tell me only 2.5 Megapixels can produce "real" photos.....
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