#Mass Media?
7 messages in this thread
I have a problem that needs a solution. Anyone with ANY ideas, large or
small!
Problem: We own a baseball card store and bought an Amiga2000HD (105M-HD)
with SuperBase 4 to record inventory (which is over 10,000 cards and
growing). Each card is fed into SuperBase 4 with its name, year, etc.
Each card also gets its own color picture file which is scanned on a color
scanner. The problem is that each scanned card is about 160K in length.
With over 10,000 cards we must be talking gigabytes here. What would be
the cheapest solution for storage of all of those cards. Mass media
storage (like optical drives)? Floppies? Archiving/Dearchiving within
SuperBase 4? Help!
Well, that would be about a 1,600 MB drive. (just for the image data)
Options: 1) there are SCSI drives that size (2,000 MB) but they run >
$15,000 or so. Doesn't sound like a real solution 🙂 (hey, wait a minute
while I back this sucker up!)
2) Do you really need 160K per card? I just sized a heavily dithered brush
in 16 color hires (360×380 pixels) and the brush was only @ 20K in size.
Using ADPro you could probably get some real nice hires/lace brush images
of the card, rather than going full screen. Just a thought. If your
average image was only 20K in size, you could store all 10,000 of them on a
205meg HD….. just a thought.
3) ASDG may have your answer RSN, in any case. They have announced that
they will be supporting JPEG image compression in ADPro in the next
release, scheduled for Fall sometime. JPEG has the ability to compress
images A LOT. Trade-off is loss of detail; the more compressed you get the
more detail you lose. For photos you could probably get a lot of
compression and scarcely know the difference. Now, will SuperBase support
direcly showing JPEG compressed images? Right now it doesn't…. maybe its
time to start working on Precision to add direct support for it?
4) You could take the bulk of your images and get them mastered to CD-ROM,
where you can get @ 550 MB on a disk. Then you could store the remainder,
and new ones, on a large HD (ie. the 205MB)…. when you had enough to fill
another CD-ROM just master another. It's not as expensive as most people
think (mastering CD-ROMS)…. particularly if you plan on selling any of
this beyond your own store…. hmmmm?
5) I don't see how archiving/dearchiving will get you much. IFF images are
already compressed. Archiving them (ARC/LHARC/etc) wouldn't save much.
Sounds like a nice use of the Amiga/Multimedia. I was just chatting with
someone else about baseball cards and the Amiga recently. Interesting how
similar ideas strike at the same time! Hope this helps.
[ MORE ]
JP>>Well, that would be about a 1,600 MB drive. (just for the image data)
JP>>Options: 1) there are SCSI drives that size (2,000 MB) but they run >
JP>>$15,000
He can hook up two of Seagate's new 1.4 gig drives for less than $5,000 for
a total of 2.8 gig. Well, we'd like to make a bit of a profit, so it might
be closer to $5,500 or maybe higher (I know our cost is less than $3,000
per drive).
Well, my info was from a review of large HD's, and must have been months
old…. ancient by HD standards, it seems 🙂
–jp–seattle–
Haha, any article on computer stuff is outdated by the time it's printed,
or at least that's what it seems like!
I'm wondering wh you need a 160k picture for each card. I'd think that a
simple 320×200 b&w image would do to identify the card (assuming you really
have the actual card in stock to show if the customer is interested.) You
could probably get by with about 10k or so per card that way, and maybe
less. If you really *need* the full color, best image, deluxe scan, a
removable media device might be in order. I've seen Sysquest 44mB devices
for around $400 (incl. 1 cart.) ((madly figuring $400 + $2700 (36
additional cartridges at $75 ea.) = $3100
…. or … 1.2 gB hard drives go for around $2500 now, and you'd need 2)
Bill, K3OZM
Support America!
David;
Maybe a couple of ideas. One, try lharc to compress. Often, graphics
files will compress quite deeply. This may give you an idea of how much
room you would save (I suspect that if compression helps, you will need to
go to a 68030 though to achieve an acceptable decompression time).
Two, try scanning at a lower resolution. This should save a bunch. Of
course the image quality will suffer some.
If one works then you could write an ARexx macro to do the decompression
for you automagically. I don't know if superbase supports ARexx or not but
MicroFiche Filler does.
An Amiga message processed by Whap!,
bill