Tosogu Classroom Vol 1

[Markus]

Thank you guys for the feedback so far.

 

I got a proof copy here which looked jut fine like Grey said and when I was asking around here in the US, no one was experiencing that weird phenomenon. So that's why I was already positive that the glitch is connected to the edition I had to chose with Lulu for non-US orders.

 

Back in the days in Austria, I was receiving my Lulu copies from France and I think that all EU deliveries, maybe even Eastern Europe and Russian deliveries are catered from France, except for the UK where Lulu has another printing partner. So any of the UK readers, do you have the issue too?

 

My working theory is as follows:

 

The pics of the series are in gross rather on the low side and also Fukushi says at several points something like: "Unfortunately, I only have that a bad picture of this or that piece." As stated earlier, I was scanning the whole series with the same scanner and with the same settings, so differences in picture quality reflect Fukushi's pics he provided to the NBTHK accordingly. As Lulu is a print on demand provider, they are of course cutting costs everywhere. So I think that the same PDF I uploaded is "interpreted" differently depending on their print partner. That is, I think that the France/EU printer renders/aliases/converts pics that are under a certain quality threshold in a way that differs from what the computer things is a decent image. As Andi said, one pic on page 312 is fine whilst the other one (one of the low-quality pics in the magazine) is crap.

 

I don't know yet how to solve that because it seems that the US and non-EU printers don't do that, i.e. make the already low-quality pics worse by some faulty aliasing algorithm. In other words, I would have to make the EU guys use another algorithm/program whatever. Or, play around with the low-quality pics, upload the PDF again, have a proof copy shipped to someone in the EU (Germany?), and rinse and repeat until these pics look okayish...

[zanilu]

I confirm that my copy has the same problems.

 

Regards

Luca

[yogoro]

In my copy of volume 2  are also numerous photo errors, especially vertical white stripes.

[Barrie B]

Hi Markus,

 

I was doing a search in the NMB for Volume three (to see if it had been released yet) and came upon this very old thread from 2018, so please forgive me if this is dead and buried. Looking through my (Vol 2) book, I notice that I have the same/ similar issues with my book in Australia; however, as Guido stated, I am more concerned with the 'English' text, than the high res pictures.

 

Barrie.

[Markus]

Hi all,

 

I will post an update on the project and the issue in a separate and new post. 

 

Thank you,

Markus

 

[Babu]

On 7/2/2018 at 5:04 PM, vajo said:

I was not satisfied with my copy of Vol 2. Many worse pictures. I hope Vol. 3 will be better.

These books being print on demand are farmed out by the bookseller to various different printers. My copy of one of Markus books was so badly printed I could not read the Japanese Kanji at all they were a messy blur.

Markus kindly sent me a digital copy but I prefer the hand on book approach.

So if you get a poor low detail copy don't just take it on the chin, complain and get it replaced. It's your money after all .

I just bought the book of famous tsuba in Japan by Markus and the images are almost black with little or no detail and the printer said pretty much that's as good as it gets! 

[Japan2112]

Definitely not "picture books", but super informative resources. My books do not have the "checkered" problem, so must be a local printing source issue. Mine were printed in the USA.  

[Surfson]

Figure on the top of 312 on my Volume 2 is also not very visible