ID's and digital pictures

Posted by: mwest

ID's and digital pictures - 18/07/2003 13:32

My company wants to use a regular digital camera to take ID pictures and they want the camera to take the picture at the right size (so that no manipulation whatsoever has to be done with software). Has anyone heard of a camera with picture sizes of 1.5 x 1.25?
Posted by: mlord

Re: ID's and digital pictures - 18/07/2003 13:41

Digital cameras don't take photos of ANY given size.

Instead, they capture images with specific numbers of pixels, eg. 2048x3072 (my camera).

But if you know the print or display resolution of the intended application for these photos (eg. ID cards at 200dpi), then you can calculate the required number of pixels and then search for a camera which records images of that pixel dimension.

However.. nearly all digicams currently produce images with a 4:3 aspect ratio (Width == (1.3333 * Height)), or a 3:2 aspect ratio (most Digital SLRs), so I don't think you'll find one with a 1.5 : 1.25 ratio.

Cheers
Posted by: bodybag

Re: ID's and digital pictures - 18/07/2003 13:44

Tell them to create and "Action" in Photoshop or another image editing program that automatically converts the picture size. It's real easy and you can run it on an enitre folder or just 1 image. I'm probably telling you something you already know, but maybe their heads are in the sand.
Posted by: andym

Re: ID's and digital pictures - 18/07/2003 14:53

I doubt you'll find a normal digital camera that'll do what you ask, I'd use something like imagemagik or netpbm to manipulate the image automatically.

When I joined the bbc, they had a video camera linked to a framestore and a custom written piece of software that cropped the 4:3 video image and then added text and printed it onto a blank smart card. Apparently the system came as a whole, from the camera to the printer.