I'm not sure if this has come up before, but I thought I'd mention it here now, because...

Lately, I've been seeing a lot of scanlators use HUGE page-sizes (for distribution, not talking about what resolutions they work at), I'm talking 2400 pixels high, or 3000 pixels high in some cases. You could call it high-quality maybe, but I'd just call it overkill.

I think that pages should be no less than 1000 pixels high but no more than 1600 pixels high.




Not convinced? Grab a cup of tea or coffee and let me explain my reasoning.

So most people these days would have (or would buy) a 1920x1080 native resolution monitor (or maybe a 1680x1050 native resolution monitor). Let's say ~1000 pixels high of viewing space to account for any bars at the top and bottom of the screen.

If you had the physical manga book in your hands, you would be able to see the full height and width of both pages at once.

But on a monitor, which is landscape, you can only see at most 1000 pixels in height (from the example above) at a time.

If a page is 1000 pixels high, you can see the full height of the manga page. But if a page is less than 1000 pixels high the text becomes difficult to read and/or a typesetting nightmare. This is not so much an issue anymore, because raws or scans tend to be better these days, with higher resolutions.

If a page is 1600 pixels high, then you can see 1000/1600=62.5% of the height of the page at a time. This doesn't seem like a lot, but keep in mind that we can only focus on so much at once anyway. Even if you had the physical book, and you could see the whole of the page (or both pages), you could only focus on some part of it. But I do think we're approaching the limit here, any larger and it gets silly:

If a page is more than 1600 pixels high, e.g. 2400 pixels high, then you can only see 1000/2400 = 41.7% of the height of the page at a time. This is far too little, smaller than a lot of manga panels: you should be able to see a minimum of 60%, though preferably more; otherwise it requires too much scrolling, and you're not able to see enough of the page. Not only that, but the width of that page would be about 1600, almost the entire width of the screen resolution, which is rather hard to focus on, unless your monitor is about a metre back from you. Do people generally put their monitors that far back? I don't know. (Haven't even considered the double page spread.)

Now, most scanlators already stick within these limits without having to be told, but... lately you get the occasional overzealous 'quality advocate' that turns that page height right up to maximum. I just think that's unnecessary and, as I hope I've demonstrated, detrimental to the reading experience. I don't see any benefit in ultra-high resolutions unless you were going to re-edit it, or print it out: which I don't think is encouraged.

I suppose that, sure, if it's too big the reader could just resize it, but most people want to "read in the original high quality (at batoto)", right? Quality's great, but let's consider ergonomics and user-friendliness too.

Just some food for thought, and, I hope, discussion.

________________
If you were to go there and come back to me hurt, I will take your place.. and pull everything you hate.. into destruction...
I will erase anything that hurts you.. from the face of this world.

Majority of the series my group releases in is 1,600px height, however I've decided to make all new projects released in 1,800px and in the future in might become even bigger than that.

The reasoning for that is very simple. Computer screen resolutions are only getting bigger.

5-6 years ago, you were considered to have big scans if you released manga at 1,400px height. The majority of scanlators released at 1,200px or even 1,100px.

Now I'd wager that the vast majority of groups do not release anything at 1,100px, heck I'd even say that modern day scans at that height are pretty much extinct, and that the amount of groups releasing at 1,200px will gradually dwindle until 1,200px height scans are extinct as well.

That said, if you really want to read manga at a lower resolution, many programs for manga readers make it so that the pages are automatically resized to whatever height/width you want them to be.

In short, the size of manga scans are only going to increase because of the progression of modern computer technology.

________________
-GGpX

I run Illuminati-Manga. You're welcome.