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Rhaetian Railway – Prototype and H0m Model Railroading

Image size, display resolution and internet connection speed in the course of time

      When I thoroughly edited this site in early 2008, I added some new pictures, and I noticed how small some of the old pictures from 1997 or 1998 are. This observation gave reason to a look at the development in the last ten years.

      This site came on the web in 1997. Then, modems with a rate of 54 kBit/s were more or less standard, and as a responsible website manager, you tried not to unduly raise your readers' telephone bills – flatrates hadn't been invented yet.
      Therefore, in early versions of this site, I had noted precisely how much the reader had to load, and you could find behind the link to a page, e.g., “182 kB graphics”.

      Today, the situation has markedly changed: In early 2008, my cable internet provider informed me that as of March 1, the connection rate for the flatrate that I subscribe to will be increased from 10,000 to 15,000 kBit/s – without additional charges. This means an increase by a factor of about 300 in just ten years!
      To be honest, I do not really care today whether a page contains one or two megabytes of pictures …

      To keep the file size small, pictures had to be small, and high degrees of JPEG compression were helpful. This was no problem, as 1024x768 was a comfortable screen resolution in the past; many WWW users still went online with 800x600.

      This, too, has drastically changed: 19 inch monitors with a display resolution of 1600x1200 pixels are now widely used, and my standard PC, a laptop (MacBook Pro 17 inch), has a resolution of 1680x1050. Pictures with a width of 400 pixels look a bit poor and make it hard for the viewer to distinguish small details.

      Today, I add new pictures with a width of about 700 pixels, even 900 are possible, so that readers can discern details. (Perhaps I will regret this again in another ten years?) I am planning to replace at least some of the old pictures with new larger and qualitatively better versions, this, however, will take some time as the old material is only available in analog form (photos or slides).

Copyright © 2008 and responsible for contents: Christoph Ozdoba.
First version created on February 17, 2008, last modified on February 17, 2008.

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