Talk:3D Fax

Untitled
This page had:

"anything over 50Kb would require"

I have changed this to:

"anything over 50 kb would require"

As the k should definately have been lowercase (and possibly ki) - however should the b really be lowercase, or was "bytes" intended? 50 kb seems too small for even this technology. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Bratch (talk • contribs) 13:46, 26 March 2007‎ (UTC)

More information
The program was available in 16bit for Windows 3.1x, 32bit for Windows 9x or later, and for Macintosh.

There were two programs, a decode-only version, which was given away for free, and the full version, which did the image encoding and decoding.

The encoded images had large amounts of data redundancy. Around 25 to 30% of the image could be destroyed and still achieve 100% perfect decoding. (There are many 2D image encoding schemes for data and most are very redundant. The 2D dotcode with the center bullseye used by UPS can be up to 25% destroyed and still be fully decoded.)

The 3D FAX decoder program could be used with a computer FAX-modem and directly read the recieved TIFF images, as well as reading scans of paper printouts. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.136.145.232 (talk • contribs) 06:41, 15 June 2007‎ (UTC)

A review and capabilities.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1563/is_n9_v13/ai_17519480/ "We liked the way it turned a 5MB TIFF file into three black-and-white pages that we could quickly fax;" That works out to slightly over 1.6 megabytes per page, with compression and redundancy. That's a heck of a lot more than 50 K! Bizzybody (talk) 22:27, 4 November 2010 (UTC)

100% reliability?
I'd be surprised if 3D Fax really relied on the recipient getting the generated image in pixel-perfect condition. There are a number of possible causes of imperfection along the line:
 * the printer dropping a pixel
 * specks of dust on the paper
 * specks of dust in the sender's fax machine
 * line noise
 * that the image the recipient scans in isn't going to be perfectly pixel-aligned with the original

The software must have been designed in such a way that there is enough leeway in the encoding to recover the original image in typical cases of the above. The simplest way to do this is to make the resolution and colour depth considerably lower than that of the fax transmission format. By my calculation, around 70 dpi (depending on the page margins) pure black-and-white would give the per-page capacity stated in the article. What fax resolutions and what scanner resolutions were around whenever this software was released? — Smjg (talk) 20:18, 8 June 2012 (UTC)