Problems with contact sheets

[Christian]

Hi,

I like the contact sheet feature very much. Especially the ease of use and customizability (if such a word exists).

However I have one big problem: yesterday I tried to print out contact sheets for my around 200 picture of my vacation. They summed up to 16 pages (not that much, really). But the pictures were 6mp and around 2MB each, thus the printing took up over 1,4GB(!) of my harddisk and took forever (effectively blocking my PC for a few hours)!

Now, I don't know if it's a problem with my printer, the printer driver or cam2pc. What are other experiences? Can something be done here?

Thanks a lot. Greetings

Christian

[nabocorp]

Christian,

first maybe you can check the resolution you used on your printer. The memory used by each page depends on the resolution and size of paper. For instance a 10 inch x 10 inch seet with a 600 dpi resolution requires a 6000x6000 pixels image (36mp!!) for optimal quality. And this image cannot be compressed in memory: it roughly takes 108MB of RAM... Multiply this by 16 pages and you realize the amount of memory needed for ths job.

To print a contact sheet you probably do not need a 600 dpi resolution. Try a lower resolution. For information a screen is 72 dpi. On some drivers the resolution can not be set directly: you have to play with the quality setting (draft/normal/high).

If you have the shareware version you can try to create the contact sheets and then print the images one after the other. Otherwise maybe you can select the exact number of images that fit on a page and perform 16 prints. In that case you won't have the page number properly on each page but at least you'll have the pages :-)

These are the workarounds I am thinking of for the moment.

Regards,
nabocorp