Cue related Picsolve rant...
The Picsolve system has been a pet peeve of mine for a long time. The price is one issue, I do think that more money can be made with cheaper products that result in more sales. This biggest issue for me however, as has been mentioned, is the dire quality of the images. Some are good, Oblivion seems to be fairly consistent, but others such as Spinball, Thirteen and Rita are far too hit and miss. As a photographer it pains me to see how bad it can be. The issues could be abolished with some often simple solutions and I find it incredible that a company such as picsolve, who pride themselves on their image quality (lord knows why), makes so many errors.
An out of focus photo of a subject that is in the same position every time, from a camera that doesn't move, is inexcusable. It's a setting which, once set, should not change so it seems to me that whoever sets these cameras up is doing a lazy job.
Another issue is exposure. In some lighting conditions the photos are underexposed and look muddy as a result. Now, I accept that the cameras use a very specific array of settings to achieve the high rate of photos taken when a train passes. This limits their ability to adjust exposure as ambient light conditions change throughout a day. However in this day and age, correct image exposure no longer makes or breaks a photo and modern image processing software is very good at rectifying such an issue. There should be an automatic system that checks the histogram of a photo that comes in, compares it to the histogram of a correctly exposed image, then increases/decreases exposure to compensate. With it being an automatic system it wouldn't be perfect - a human decision would be far more accurate - but it would be fit for purpose and would improve their current results.
The next issue on the list... White Balance! While a lot of guests may not know what this is, it makes a drastic difference to the look of a photo. The cameras can't adjust their WB settings for the same reasons they can't for exposure. Again, my solution is post-processing. They could add a grey card to the trains which software could check and adjust the WB accordingly. Now I think about it, this could also be a solution for exposure.
My final pet peeve is the resolution of the images. It's low. I don't know if this is the quality of camera or not, but the product a customer receives is low-res. It's especially noticeable if you get a digital copy. On the Picsolve website, they boast 10 megapixels but that's not what I have recieved.
It could well be that I am over reacting and that I am nit-picking, but I am a great believer in the effect these small issues have on the subconscious interpretation of a photograph. If all these were corrected I think that more guests would appreciate and make purchases as a result.
Back to price related discussion, I also think that if they insist on charging these extortionate prices then the photo quality should be reflected in them. There is no way I would part with that much cash for such shoddy work. I wanted a Smiler picture but the white balance was so blue that I didn't bother. I think I would pay (at a push!) for a sharp, correctly exposed, correctly coloured, high-resolution photograph of my friends and I scared poo-less on Rita and not feel tooooooo ripped off. (Maybe)
On a side note, I don't claim to know for certain how Picsolve cameras/systems work, I'm making assumptions based on the images I have seen and my experience during my photography degree. It may well be that Picsolve have procedures in place to correct the issues described above, but if that's the case they don't work very well so there must be something else.
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