[Richard T. Eger]

Dear Ruy, et al,

Points are raised pro and con. But, I also sense a buggy whip mentality: That's how it has been and should be into the future. We wouldn't have "progress" in its most general form if it weren't for someone trying to improve something or creating something new, like the computers and Internet through which we are having these very discussions.

As I have collected magazines that date back into the 40's, the change in quality has been very apparent. My 40's magazines are generally on very cheap, now quite brittle, matte paper. Photo quality is coarse halftone. Color? What color? Things got a tad better with the RAF Flying Review, better quality paper, but still matte, and still of dubious photo printing quality. This was later supplanted with Flying Review International, produced on semi-gloss paper (what, I think, we are lumping together with glossy), but of still less than stellar photo quality printing. This transitioned into the first incarnation of Air Enthusiast International, which wasn't a notable improvement in print quality, except that the color plates looked better. This was followed by Air International, a potential step slightly backwards. Today's Air Enthusiast may be a mite better. Overall, though, there is a definite improvement over the quality of the 40's and 50's.

Is that good enough? Not in my book. How many of you out there have taken a book or magazine image and scanned it at 100, 200, 300 dpi or more? Immediately you saw that the image wasn't analog. It's a halftone, or, in the case of color, likely multi-pass printing, which can make it look better, but it still isn't analog. But, with today's 5 megapixel cameras, we are getting to the point that the results of film analog and digital can't be differentiated in the range that we would find useful. So, it isn't that the printed image is digital, but how coarsely digital it is. That's the improvement that we should be pushing for.

Remember when Monogram had a lock on quality? There was Monogram, the gold standard, and then every other publisher. What did Tom Hitchcock know to create such a premium product? For those fortunate enough to have a copy, take a look at his 1982 edition of Smith & Creek's Jet Planes of the Third Reich. It was printed in Singapore. It doesn't match today's standards, but, back then, it set the standard. Why the Far East has the best presses in the world, I don't know, but, in my experience in buying books, they do. And they keep getting better.

I've got a 1998 Hewlett-Packard HP-722C inkjet printer. In its day, it set the standard. Today, it is out of date. We can get literally analog appearing prints off of the latest printers. Beautiful photos. There's a whole market in photo quality printers that has developed over the last several years.

I don't believe that the technology is not there to do better in magazine and book photo printing. Like Jukka, I want to see better.

Okay, let's take it from a pragmatic historian point of view. Say I want to compare photos from the print media. Is photo A a photo of the same aircraft as photo B? Not only do I want clear detail of the aircraft, but also what is in the background. I don't want to zoom in, only to see a sea of halftone dots. Last spring I spent a bundle on Ken Bokelman's Me 262 photos, only to find out that most were published in the 4-volume S&C Me 262 books. Shucks. But, what I do have, are analog prints. I can take them and blow them up to see fine detail, something I am limited to in the S&C books. Not only do I not run into dots, but I also can see subtle shading, rather than a sea of black or monotone.

How many of you have a photo in your collection, been there for years and years, then came along another photo and all of a sudden you realized the true significance of that older photo? You grab it out, put it on your scanner, zoom in on that one new detail, and then you say "Oh my G-d! I didn't know that was there! It's been there all along, but I never realized it!" If that photo is analog, you have a lot better chance at a Eureka moment than if it is something that was published in RAF Flying Review back in the 50's.

When I look at poor photo printing quality, I think, how sad, so much information originally available, but lost due to lousy printing.

Okay, I'm obsessing on photos. Clearly, the text is important. Depending on what is being presented, one or the other may be significantly more important that the other. Still, what's important to one may not be what is important to another. A single photo in a highly text oriented book may provide a crucial clue to a longstanding question. Here's such a case:

On page 181 of Hugh Morgan's Me 262 Stormbirds Rising is a photo looking from the rear into the fuselage of the U.S. Navy Me 262B-1a as it was slowly being disassembled by the Texas Airplane Factory. At the time, I was trying to assist Arthur Bentley for the fuel system layout illustrations for the 4-volume S&C Me 262 opus. It's a small printed image, but remarkably detailed, and withstood enlarging rather well. The fuel tanks had been removed, but the fuel lines remained. Still, there was detail I couldn't make out on the right side. I subsequently visited the Me 262 Project in Everett, Washington, where I happened onto an original color copy of the photo. Immediately, more detail stood out, which eventually helped in creating the final drawings.

The photos weren't the main thrust of Morgan's book, and some others were distinctly below par in printing quality, but that particular one was remarkably good. The point is you grab it where you can get it. Insisting on a rising tide to lift all boats mentality is the way to go. The status quo is not.

Regards,
Richard