Disney's Photo Pass service / Photo CD - crucial info

Should you plan on going to Disney, FL, here's some info on their Photopass service.

In essence, it is excellent, you get salaried employees with high quallity Nikon's taking pictures in the best spots all over Disney.

You can then use their website to publish these pictures into different products. I really *love* their coffee mugs.

The problem is that they charge excessive price for the JPG so you can download and print, or if you buy ALL the pictures into one CD.

Excessive for what you get - ALTERED images reduced from the RAW 12 mega pixels into regular JPG's of 2136x3216. That's like a 6MP image.

Excellent for 4x6, the image names even have the text FourBySix.jpg.

LOUSY for printing on anything higher than 5x7's, 8x10 and up will look fuzzy / blurry.

So, don't buy the CD, pick & choose the good ones and buy as a per-download / unit. If you want too many and the 150$ for the CD is worth it, fine, but I never would have bought knowing that Disney gives you altered, tiny, images.

Seems like Disney is stuck in the year 2001... :welcome:

 

Hindsight...you get caught up on Disney hype.

Worst is that I own a Nikon D90 with great lenses, just like they used. I just brought my cheapie pocket cams (14 MP!) for just such "good enough" 4x6 prints.

When you stay onsite - the dining plan is terrific if you exploit it well.

 

I received an email from Disney, stating that the resized Jpgs are done in the camera.
They don't shoot in 12MP Raw, but in the lower 6MP compressed JPG.

This allows faster transfers of the pictures over their WiFi and requires less processing power and storage on their servers.

I'd like to meet the project manager that said, Ah 6 megapixels is Good Enough, and smack him on the head.