The Rasterbator - Create huge, rasterized images from any picture.

by bearwithclaws • 17 years ago

27 23 17 years ago

rriepe• 17 years ago

Pretty neat- used to do this with a b&w copier when I was on the newspaper staff back in high school. We had stuff like giant pictures of David Letterman up on the wall. None of it really made sense but it was funny to us. Gonna try it with my printer.

pmichaud3• 17 years ago

This is sort of confusing. Any picture you can upload to that service is already a "raster" picture (as opposed to a vector picture). I think what they mean is that they just blow up really huge?

chancho• 17 years ago

I think the important part is that it's half-toned (little dots of varying radii according to color and intensity) rather than just making each pixel into one big square. So really its a misnomer. Should be halftonabator or ditherbator, if only those rhymed with masturbate. (TEE HEE!)

calambrac4• 17 years ago

Where does it say you can't upload vector images? And, really, we're dinging someone for coming up with a product name that isn't perfectly descriptive now?

axod3• 17 years ago

Surely the name was supposed to sound like "masturbator". I don't think it can have mass appeal with that name, odd choice.

pmichaud3• 17 years ago

I made this great new device called the "Automatic gasoline car to electric car converter." It takes your gasoline car and cleans the outside of it with soap and water! It shines when it comes out the other side!

What do you mean the name is misleading? Are you really dinging me for coming up with a product name that isn't perfectly descriptive??

axod3• 17 years ago

This seems like complete spam to me :/ Am I missing something here?

calambrac4• 17 years ago

How is it any spammier than any of the umpteen million other links to one-off idea websites that we get around here? Because the submitter didn't call it their "startup"?

riffic• 17 years ago

This has been around for a while and isn't really spammy, people have been using it to plaster blown up art on their dorm walls

axod3• 17 years ago

It just seems a bit trivial to me. Surely this has been done a thousand times already.

bearwithclaws• 17 years ago

Guys, you got to try this. It works perfectly. Just upload a really huge photo, 'rasterize', then print it.

PostOnce• 17 years ago

I found this a while ago when I was looking for something to break up a map into one-page segments so I could have a giant map. Never did find an ideal solution.

Anyone know another tool like this that doesn't convert the image to half-tone? I want to use one of those blank world maps from Wikipedia to print out as a giant tiled map to assemble on the wall.

tezza• 17 years ago

mpage on unix

I believe some of the more recent Photoshops have that functionality

Failing that: Illustrator can open pdf, and you can scale the output to the desired dimensions and carefully segment them yourself.

zokier• 17 years ago

Imho it produces cool results with large dot size and relatively small number of sheets, with some space between sheets. Here's one example: http://img60.imageshack.us/img60/1267/rasterbationdt5.png

And if you do this, use some sturdy material to print on. Standard copier paper as it just looks crappy.

edit: Thinking of it, maybe canvas prints would be cool. 10in square prints, maybe 1in apart...

kungfooey• 17 years ago

This has been around for a while, but it's still pretty cool. I have a poster-size printout of "Enter The Dragon" that I printed out about five years ago, and it still looks great.

andyleclair• 17 years ago

I just introduced my office to this by creating a larger-than-life copy of The Dude. Kittens were next. I fear for our productivity.

baseonmars• 17 years ago

i did a 50 A4 sheet picture with this of grandmaster flash. i used a tiny source picture (less than vga). I took the time to trim the edges and tape all the sheets together first. this made sticking it to the wall a simpler task.

if i could have done anything differently i'd have used a printer that could do borderless printing. it looked awesome, would def recommend.

mkyc• 17 years ago

When this first came out, I recall bypassing print quotas at my then-campus by finding the ip of and connecting directly to one of the many printers. May I be forgiven, the printer rolled on for what seemed like a half-hour, deposited 100 pages. I took them in a stack to the campus print shop and asked them to cut off the white edges. I'm sure they flipped through - 100 whole pages of dots - and wondered what the hell I was doing, though they didn't ask. A fun time ensued, me carefully taping the whole thing together across the corners. Went ceiling to floor, with a row or two to spare. I later sent the picture in, and was pleased to see it marked "cool" - last time I checked it was in the page 40's.

My friend, she had sent me a picture of Natalie Portman in these sweet retro headphones the day before. I didn't really think far ahead, since I could always print another off. I never did, though. After I put it up, and the sense of accomplishment wore off, I realized I wasn't the sort to put lone wall-high posters of girls up in my room, even with dashing headphones. Not that I didn't think she was very pretty. It should have been Vonnegut, Derek Parfit, Schopenhauer (it's his hair I admire most), David Hume, Licklider, though I didn't know most of them then (not that I truly do now). Natalie remains in one of my boxes of papers, folded into an immaculate stack.

Pistos2• 17 years ago

Technical merits aside, my opinion is that the name and theme (see the FAQ page) are crude, and a turn off, bordering on offensive. That their nature would be glossed over, ignored, or even not noticed certainly speaks about our industry and times.

The Rasterbator - Create huge, rasterized images from any picture.

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