Poor quality images on projector despite high quality scan

Hi,
I'm due to give a lecture on my experiences in Australia, and I need
to show some pictures I've taken in that regard. I've also downloaded
pictures of exotic, yet common animals in Australia, that I don't have
any pictures of myself.

Now, I figured that by scanning the negatives in a fairly high
resolution, I'd get the best results. I have a Canon semi-pro scanner
that works fine (usually). Now I scan these negatives, and on my
computer-monitor they look exellent - much better that the ones I've
downloaded. I figured I'd burn them on a CD and show them using a
DVD-player and a Big-screen projector. This seemingly works fine,
except that the images that I scanned myself look horrible - whereas
the infirior downloaded images look fine!

Is there any reasonable explanation on why this is - and what I can do
to fix it.

And on a related matter - I thought about using the computer as a
player, and just connecting it to the projector, that has a cable like
the computer-monitor - but I get a NO SIGNAL. There's a switch on the
projector that says "tv"/"Computer" and I have it on "Computer". Do I
need a driver og is there some special something I have to activate on
my computer?

Any help would be welcome.

Regards,
Nikolaj Winther

 

You should verify what are the maximum resolution, the number of colors
and the frequency supported by the projector.
Just to make sure that the signal goes through, change your display
settings to 640x480, 256 colors and the lowest frequency for the graphic
card. Once you get that working, you can increase the quality.

 

Your high quality scans most likely contain a pixel count well above what
your projector can deliver, thus your images are being quickly and roughly
downsampled to fit your projector's needs. Figure out what your projector's
specs are, and rework your images to fit the requirements. Save your
original big scans, though. Those are great for printing!

 

You don't say "what" is bad about them, but I'll take the following whack at it:

Projectors do not have very high resolution. In photoshop you must re-size your
images to the projection resolution. At that size, use USM to achieve clean and
haloless edges.

If you embed the images in a Powerpoint or such, then again, the image must be
sized correctly and USM'd for its size when projected.

You may be having color problems as well, so edit the images using the projector
nearby (this is the quick and dirty way).

Cheers,
Alan

 

Direct your queries to comp.sys.laptops - people there have a lot of
experience in projecting presentations. I can tell you that this problem
with terrible looking photos seems to happen absolutely loads - everyone
seems to fall foul of it. However, it's not necessarily to do with your
large file size - usually it's a problem more fundamental due to screen
resolutions and projection resolutions not matching. MS Powerpoint will do
an o.k. job of re-sampling the image to fit the screen, but this isn't all
that's required.

As I said, redirect your question - it happens so often, someone will have a
clear answer there.

Duncan.

 

...and on the second point, if your computer is a laptop, look for a
little picture of a monitor - often it's on the F4 key. Holding down
the laptops `Fn` key, and tapping F4 (or whichever) will then redirect
the display signal to the data projector. Check the laptop's manual.

If that doesn't help, check your display card's resolution and make
sure it is in range (both resolution and color depth) for the
projector.

If all this sounds like gibberish, you really need to go find someone
who has done this stuff before, and take copious notes..!

 

As the others have mentioned, this is a common problem with digital
projection. Anything above the resolution of the projector is going to
look crap because the VGA card of your laptop is sending a massive image
to a device that can probably only project at either 640x480 or 800x600
pixels at a time.

Change your scanned images to 72dpi and size them to the same dimensions
as your projector.