Win one of ten copies of BluBox V4 during March

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[Stephen]

Re: Win one of ten copies of BluBox V4 during March

Unfortunately its not Mac compatible at the moment

[Unregistered]

Re: Win one of ten copies of BluBox V4 during March

Unfortunately its not Mac compatible at the moment

Stephen,

Blubox will run perfectly on Intel Mac in conjunction with Boot Camp or Parallels. There are plans to release a standalone Mac version later this year.

Regards

Peter

[Stephen]

Re: Win one of ten copies of BluBox V4 during March

Stephen,

Blubox will run perfectly on Intel Mac in conjunction with Boot Camp or Parallels. There are plans to release a standalone Mac version later this year.

Regards

Peter

Thanks for the info Peter, I use Parallels, but only for a couple of essential Apps that have no Mac version.

[JSR]

Re: Win one of ten copies of BluBox V4 during March

BluBox V4 can*:

* Compress photos by up to 95% without sacrificing picture quality

I always like the funny "claims" that manufacturers make. It still makes me laugh today.

Create a 1000x1000 blank picture and save as a BMP - it's just under 3MB. Now save it as a JPG at 100% - it's 12K. Oh look, we've compressed it by "up to 99.5% without sacrificing picture quality" - that's even better than "BluBox V4".



I'm sorry, but if manufacturers are going to use percentages to support their wild claims, such claims need to be seen for how ridiculous they are. I'd prefer them to tell us something useful, rather than to use percentages to blind people with big numbers.

* Dramatically reduce the time taken to send photos by email and FTP. Send a whole album in the time it usually takes to email a couple of photos!

Nowhere in the article does it say that you can view a BluBox compressed image on another computer without having BluBox installed. So you can only reduce time taken to send photos by email and FTP if the recipient has bought BluBox? No wonder they're giving away copies for free if it's going to force anyone you send your images to into buying a copy at full price.

Cynical? Who, me?

[Stephen]

Re: Win one of ten copies of BluBox V4 during March

Would be interested to hear a retort from the boys at BluBox

[JSR]

Re: Win one of ten copies of BluBox V4 during March

Would be interested to hear a retort from the boys at BluBox

The article ends saying that DPnow will have a copy in to review shortly. Hopefully, such a review won't go after headlines and will instead concentrate on the facts.

I'm sure BluBox is a perfectly sound piece of software for those who need compression and security for their images.

The press release doesn't say to me "must buy". The news page, the press release, and the website all seem to repeat the same things verbatim. I did find on the website that you can download the "blubox viewer" for free - presumably for viewing photos that are sent via blubox. The viewer runs on Windows 2000, XP and Vista - so forget it if you're running an older OS, Linux, or something not Microsoft-sanctioned. The viewer is a 10MB download but requires Microsoft NET 2.0 (another 50MB+ download if you don't have it already).

Given the reducing cost of hard drive space these days, I don't really see the advantage of introducing another proprietary format for your images that ties you to one supplier. The encryption thing may be useful for some, but with the price of hard drives dropping, using password-protected zip files would seem to be the most compatible option and wouldn't tie you down to a single-supplier's proprietary format.

I've downloaded the trial for a simple test.

I took a regular photo from my camera (Nikon Coolpix 5700, jpeg) - a picture of a red car, blue sky, sunny day, a typical photo. It's 1.52MB as it comes from the camera.

I saved it from BluBox using Lossless (Binary) because of the stated claims of "without sacrificing picture quality". Then I did it all over again using the default settings of "medium" compression (which are the "default" settings, so if you don't want to risk your images being degraded you'll want to change that before you start).

The two .blu files saved as followed -

1.52MB (1,594,719 bytes) - original
1.51MB (1,586,766 bytes) - BluBox Lossless
1.51MB (1,586,442 bytes) - Regular WinZIP (set to "fast")
1.21MB (1,273,935 bytes) - BluBox Medium Compress

So, saving it as lossless gained me nothing. Saving it as medium compressed saved about 20% - and you'd save more than that by doing a regular JPEG compression of 80% quality in your graphics software (that comes in at 1.13MB). For note, a 95% space reduction would take the original 1.52MB down to under 80K (.07MB).

It would seem, then, that BluBox offers us no space saving advantage over that which is already inherent in the JPG format anyway. I've no doubt that if you saved multiple photos in the same archive you'd save a little more simply due to how clusters are arranged on the computer, but you'd get that from any software that turns random access data into a serial access archive anyway.

It's not for me, then, so I've uninstalled the trial.

Oh, and as soon as it's uninstalled, my .blu files can no longer be opened (to be expected). The original JPGs are fine, though. That's the problem with proprietary formats. The internet is littered with people complaining that images can't be opened that were saved in the past using old Kodak and Microsoft formats that are no longer supported. No one ever has trouble opening regular JPGs, though.

I won't be entering the prize draw.

[19ninety]

Re: Win one of ten copies of BluBox V4 during March

Cant help but think its like tons of other novelty software out there.

If I want to move a large amount of images securley, simply WinRAR with a good password and encrypted file names. Everyone can use WinRAR for free too.

There are probably other advantages of BlueBox, but in todays computer world on a small scale modern PC's handle images files just fine in terms of processor, RAM and storage.

Sending files via internet, as more and more people have broad band ..... the time spent compressing files is often greaten then the time spent sending them uncompressed. "... is very inefficiently compressed by ZIP routines. You may get 10% compression if you are lucky." Again, WinRAR wins due to the above comment.

On a large(er) scale even as a fairly amatuer photographer I already have over 10GB's of images that I've compiled over the years ... I like the ability to be able to quickly browse them with MS Image Viewer and then sendto PShop when required, I dont like the sound of my images being locked inside a 3rd party extension which requires my other machine or the other users to also have the 3rd party application installed to be able to 'extract' the image for use.

I used to use Picasa years ago, but once I got to a certain amount of images, it wasnt practical to scroll through 1000's on images by view, its alot quicker and easier and quicker for me to browse Windows folders and use its options for List, Details, Thumbnails, this has been made even easier in the last 12 months by the purchase of Vista where you can hold down Ctrl and use the mouses scroll wheel to switch between List, Details & Tiles and then 34 increasing Thumbnail sizes. On my widescreen monitor, this means I can see 8 of the largest thumbnails at a time.

BlueBox sounds more aimed at the average consumer whos easily sold on figures, hense its attractive price tag, bold claims and colourful packaging/name.
Ian's review may well prove us wrong though

[John Houghton]

Re: Win one of ten copies of BluBox V4 during March

It would seem, then, that BluBox offers us no space saving advantage over that which is already inherent in the JPG format anyway.

A more realistic test would have been to save an uncompressed file with Bluebox using lossless compression. If that gave a file size smaller than the (lossy) jpeg file, it would most certainly be offering a worthwhile advantage.

John

[Unregistered]

Re: Win one of ten copies of BluBox V4 during March

I always like the funny "claims" that manufacturers make. It still makes me laugh today.

Create a 1000x1000 blank picture and save as a BMP - it's just under 3MB. Now save it as a JPG at 100% - it's 12K. Oh look, we've compressed it by "up to 99.5% without sacrificing picture quality" - that's even better than "BluBox V4".



I'm sorry, but if manufacturers are going to use percentages to support their wild claims, such claims need to be seen for how ridiculous they are. I'd prefer them to tell us something useful, rather than to use percentages to blind people with big numbers.


Nowhere in the article does it say that you can view a BluBox compressed image on another computer without having BluBox installed. So you can only reduce time taken to send photos by email and FTP if the recipient has bought BluBox? No wonder they're giving away copies for free if it's going to force anyone you send your images to into buying a copy at full price.

Cynical? Who, me?

I believe the Blubox viewer is FREE!...no purchase required which means that anyone wishing to view the content of a Blubox may do so without having to reach for their debit/credit card first in exactly the same way that a PDF file may be read using a free PDF reader.

Cynical? you sir? hmmm maybe a tad!

[Unregistered]

Re: Win one of ten copies of BluBox V4 during March

A more realistic test would have been to save an uncompressed file with Bluebox using lossless compression. If that gave a file size smaller than the (lossy) jpeg file, it would most certainly be offering a worthwhile advantage.

John

Blubox supports the optimisation of many different digital image files formats including of course jpeg. Users maybe quite suprised by the results of the optimisation when working with Tiff's for instance. I test drove Blubox using a rather large 1.63GB of nice portrait shots I have and managed to reduce this data set to around 22mb....not quite small enough to attach to an email but impressive all the same. Yes...the quality of the image I printed direct from the Blubox 'box' was excellent....