Amazingly the forecast rain held off. I decided I’d give the car a bit of a run out and take my digital camera off to take some pictures of sea birds at Bempton Cliffs – it’s somewhere I went probably the best part of 20 years ago as a kid, and it’s famous for being home to lots of puffins during the summer. There was approximately 1 there today!

My trusty Kodak Z740 has a 10x optical zoom, but that wasn’t enough to get good shots of distant birds, so the digital zoom came into play. People can often be dismissive of the digital zoom, but if it’s a question of not getting the shot or getting it, but with a few digital artefacts, there’s no choice. That said having a decent optical zoom for the digital to extend is far better than digital alone.

When you print digital photos you have a couple of options – print them on your computer printer, or take/send them to somewhere that will print them for you.

So, confused about which was the best option, I set about doing the maths to see what the DIY method would cost per 6×4 print. Given that the maths are a bit tricky I figured I’d show my working here.

So the starting point – my printer is the Lexmark Z35, and a colour cartridge for it costs me £18.00 at Asda. Asda’s photo paper costs £3.90 for 50 sheets.

Lexmark claim the yield of the No26 cartridge to be 275 pages at 15% coverage.

So first thing to do is work out what area 275 pages at 15% equates to at total coverage.

An A4 sheet is 210×297mm which comes to 62370mm²
Multiplied by 275 comes to 17151750mm² and 15% of that is 2572762.5mm², the area which one cartridge can totally cover.

So we’re interested in 6″x4″ sheets. In metric terms, that’s 152×101mm, an area of 15352mm².

A simple bit if division tells us that we can totally cover 167 areas of 6×4″.

So we now know that from one cartridge we can produce 167 prints. Except I never believe these yield figures so I’m going to round it down to 150 for the purposes of these calculations.

The cartridge cost £18.00. So 1800p/150 = 12p per print, for ink.

Looking at the paper, £3.90 gets you 50 sheets, so 390p/50 = 7.8p for each piece of paper.

Totalling that up you’re looking at 20p pre 6×4 sheet.

So given that even one-hour express photo printing on the high street is usually less than this, it would appear that printing at home is best held as a reserve option for emergencies!

This is a work of genius – Google Image Labeller

Here’s the deal – Google image search can be a bit, well crappy, at times, because images on the web don’t really have much in the way of metadata  – it has to guess what a picture is all about from the surrounding text.

So Google have come up with a game, where you’re partnered with a random person and shown a series of images.  You type in keywords for the picture and your partner does as well.  When you both match the same terms you get 100 points and a new picture.

Ok, it’s not the best online game you’ll ever find, but you are doing something useful and helping to make it easier to find pictures to plagiarise in the future

Thought I'd check out the local reservoir. Having eventually found it (with little help from Sat Nav as I'd screwed up the POI file I made… damn long winding country roads with nowhere to turn round), here are a few shots:

As promised, a few pictures from my Kodak EasyShare Z740, taken on a trip to Hebden Bridge

Before I get to these two, I guess I’d better point out that I took them to demonstrate the 10x digital zoom, not for anorak purposes at all. Nope, absolutely positively not for any anorak reasons.

(third pic is a crop of one very similar to the second one)