General - Low resolution posters, resized to seem bigger than they are

antipax User

Written at 18 Jan 2012 on 23:09

I just bought 100 credits because i was told this site was excellent for movie poster scans, guess what? All the ones I've been interested in have either ridiculous sizes like under 1000 pixels one side (600, 700, 400!) or if they're really big, I spend 2 credits downloading those and more often than not, they've been very poorly blown up in size using software. It's almost impossible to detect this while looking at the thumbnail or miniature in the poster page. This is horrible and I need to report it.
I mean, I'm looking at about half of the posters I've downloaded so far and they're very blurry, pixelated with jpeg artifacts. I do not recommend buying credits for this website anymore, unless you are looking for modern posters and not vintage movie posters. You'll be disappointed.
The modern posters 90s, 00s, 10s, are good, and you even have choices for textless versions, but older ones from 80s and back it's very hard to get good copies and if you see a big one, it's probably been poorly blown up in size using software.So beware.
Drarakel User

Written at 19 Jan 2012 on 22:37

If there are credits issues, it's better to directly contact a webmaster - see 'Contact us' right down at the site.
antipax wrote:
All the ones I've been interested in have either ridiculous sizes like under 1000 pixels one side (600, 700, 400!)
This is not a poster shop. And you're not obliged to download posters.
This is a database for posters - posters that are sent from the users of this site. Blow-ups of course shouldn't happen. Sadly, some sneak through.

You wrote: "This is horrible and I need to report it."
If you report here (or via report button) which posters are blow-ups, we can do something about that.

Written at 20 Jan 2012 on 05:41

I too have had this problem,it would be great if a portion of the full size poster could be previewed? Another problem is poorly scanned posters such as this: http://www.movieposterdb.com/poster/fe7fd39b
I understand that sometime this might be the only source for a poster but again a full size preview would be helpful in this situation.
Drarakel User

Written at 20 Jan 2012 on 14:24

rgrantshowtime wrote:
Another problem is poorly scanned posters such as this: http://www.movieposterdb.com/poster/fe7fd39b
I've changed the country from Russia to US. Apart from that, I see no big problem. As you said, it's a scan with no perfect quality. But, well, it's the best version of the cover here at the moment - and no blow-up. If you find a much better version, you can replace it - and get credits for it.
The moderators could make a note or use a new category for scans (that suggestion was made some years ago). But these images are not always bad, and often, scans are the only possibility.

Sure, some sort of preview for all the users would be helpful. But I'm not sure if it would solve all the 'quality' issues. In some of the cases it could be even deceitful. (If you see a preview of a small region that looks like a blow-up, so you think that the whole image is a blow-up. But in reality it isn't.) You would need the full image in order to see the full quality.
Of course, only Martin can say if such things are possible. Maybe you want to re-post it in the Development board ("Got some ideas?").
Komond Moderator

Written at 26 Jan 2012 on 14:57

If everyone who found blow-ups would tell it would be helpful. I always thought people usually just find mistakes and instead of report they think bad about the site, but no blow-up reported will be there anymore, at least it would be resized to a more proper size (if not find a better original) and upload it that way. When the size is correctly small well, the size is there to see and it won't fool anyone. If it says 600 it's 600, if it's not enough at least you know it in advance.

About the preview well, I think it would help, but I would also hope if someone finds (or suspect really) a blow-up that way they tell us to delete it, but maybe people would just say "blow-up, I won't download it" and don't tell.

Don't wait to be upset, if you find a blow-up picture, tell so we can fix/delete it.
Martin Owner

Written at 28 Jan 2012 on 18:04

We are actually thinking about a preview function. It's there in some form for webmasters, but not yet optimized for user-friendly use.

Until then, please do use the report/contact button and tell us about it. Not only will we delete the image if it's really a blowup, we will also refund your credits.