Italy relaunched - or: the joy of slide-scanning

As some of you probably know, I currently have some time on my hands. So I had a closer look at the older parts of my site, especially the section featuring our millenium trip to Italy. The colours were way too bright, the slide frames did not look good any more, and the copyright statement was refering to an old e-mail address instead of the zanzig.com web site. What's more, because I added photos later, the overall style was not consistent any longer.

Well, to make a long story short - I just scanned the original slides again, this time using the Minolta Dimage Scan Elite II scanner with 2800 dpi resolution.

But this was no fun - I suddenly noticed that those seven year old slides had some issues. I found that only the 100 ASA slides would result in good scans, while the 400 ASA slides looked all grain-ish and thus unsharp. Basically, some terrific shots of the past have just become useless for anything larger than 8x12 inches. It does not surprise me, though, because we all have better monitors today, and by now we are used to the flawless photos coming from digital cameras.

The good news is that you (the web user) will not see such problems - the new scans look much better than the old ones, especially the colors are much more realistic than before! And I think the trip report is now consistent again.

So, please have a look at the revamped site, and let me know what you think.

3 weeks in Italy