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Survey: Is 1680 pixel x 1050 images "big enough" ?

Posted: Wed Jan 12, 2011 12:41 am
by totalmotorcycle
Hi everyone,

Soon I will be creating the new 2012 motorcycle and ATV/Quad model guides so I thought I'd pose this question to the community.

Lots of visitors rave about Total Motorcycle's great huge sized press images of the motorcycle models I put up and how they are not "tag spammed" all over the image (All images are clean of tagging unlike the vast majority of sites out there that spam tag their images).

Since Total Motorcycle started in 2000, I have scaled the image size of the photos in our Model Guides to most commonly used monitor resolutions. Back in 2000, it was 800x600, then I moved up to 1024, 1280 and am currently using 1680x1050, which is huge (that's the maximum resolution of my 20" monitor I'm using).

The question is, should I go even bigger? Say, 1980 for 2012 or is 1680 big enough.

Below is a sample 1680 image and the thumbnail 555 pixel image I use for the guides:

555 pixel thumbnail
Image

1680 pixel full size
Image

BTW - If you are courious what bike this is, it's the new 2011 Honda Sabre Switchblade (Pro Drag) Concept. I just put it up this morning.

http://www.totalmotorcycle.com/photos/p ... roDrag.htm

Re: Survey: Is 1680 pixel x 1050 images "big enough" ?

Posted: Wed Jan 12, 2011 5:52 am
by Wrider
1680 is big enough for me. I've got a 19 inch widescreen laptop hooked to a 21" flatpanel for a dual monitor setup and it's bigger than either of those. I hate having to scroll around images so leave it at that IMO!

Re: Survey: Is 1680 pixel x 1050 images "big enough" ?

Posted: Thu Jan 13, 2011 2:34 am
by totalmotorcycle
Great, thanks for that. 1680 is truly a big graphic size for the majority of people out there. I'm not sure if we are going to have 30" and 40" computer monitors out to really warrent the increase in graphic size but I thought I'd ask. Myself, I'm happy with the 20" for size, although I might go with a 24" to make it a little easier doing TMW as I can have more stuff on the screen at once, although I might not increase my screen resolution much higher... I'm working at 1152x864.

Mike

Re: Survey: Is 1680 pixel x 1050 images "big enough" ?

Posted: Thu Jan 13, 2011 5:43 pm
by pchast
Actually the size is bordering on too big. The reason is that I and others are stuck with dial up modems and the time to get such large files is expensive.
All too often posters do not resize their files.

Yes I like seeing it that big. I just can't invest the time from home.

Re: Survey: Is 1680 pixel x 1050 images "big enough" ?

Posted: Fri Jan 14, 2011 12:31 am
by totalmotorcycle
pchast wrote:Actually the size is bordering on too big. The reason is that I and others are stuck with dial up modems and the time to get such large files is expensive.
All too often posters do not resize their files.

Yes I like seeing it that big. I just can't invest the time from home.
You will be happy to know that I've designed the site to have each page as small a KB size as possible, thus you won't see any FLASH on Total Motorcycle and all the photos are hand resized and manually optimized for size as wel. The image above could easily be over 2MB in size but it's just 369KB. :D

Load time is the other reason I choose to have optimized hand-sized thumbnails as well for every photo. This one is just 56KB so it loads much faster than the big one (you only get the big one if you click on the small one).

Image

Overall, I'm glad to hear that the 1680 image is big enough, that helps me out a lot. :D

Thanks for the feedback thus far people, it is much appreciated.

Mike