Recent conversations have me wondering about what readers want, in terms of scanlation release page sizes/resolutions. I attempted to search the forums for discussions on this, but I didn't see anything. If there's an older post about this, please toss me the link!

Readers, what size do you prefer now? I arbitrarily came up with the small/medium/large cut-off values; others might have different definitions.

Considerations for release size:
1) The height of a physical manga book is smaller than the height of a typical monitor. Currently, the average desktop resolution is 1080p high, with laptops lagging at 768p. Thus, a height of even 1100p is larger than the physical manga book.
2) We read books closer to ourselves than we look at monitors. Thus, to be able to read the text at a larger distance on the monitor, digital page sizes/text are increased (commonly to 1300-1600p). This has the consequence of making the page too big to fit on the screen all at once, and we need to scroll or resize down to see the entire image.
3) Being unable to see the image all at once is detrimental to the reading experience, since physical manga pages are seen all at once. In particular, frames which stretch the entire page vertically require scrolling to see.
4) The larger the digital release size, the more scrolling is needed to see the entire frame/page, and the more detrimental it is to the overall reading experience.
5) As technology advances, resolutions increase. In example, while a 1100p page would today fit on a 1080p monitor, in the future as monitors become 1200p or 1400p native resolution, manga released today at 1100p will look smaller and smaller. Thus, releasing at a larger size ensures that manga can be read comfortably even years into the future.

Why this poll?
I have a feeling that most people are OK with "whatever" size releases. However, I know there are some readers who really like large releases. I'm curious to know if they'll still read small/medium releases. For instance, digital raws are cheap and convenient to acquire, but are generally limited to 1200p or 1400p high. As a scanlator, I'd like to know if the majority of large-preferred readers will ignore series released from these smaller digital raws, or if they'll still read them. This is assuming that all other aspects (trans/edit quality) are equal.

My personal preference... I have the average monitor size (1080p) and find that text on small pages (1200p) can get rather small and difficult to read sometimes. I favor medium release sizes.

Thanks for reading, and feel free to sound off in the comments!

My preference is:
1300-1400 for releases based on magazine raws.
1600+ for releases based on tankoubons.

I don't like releases with height of 1200px or less. Mainly because 1200 is my screen height and I like scrolling the pages.

Also, I'm often reading manga at ~2m away from the screen (distance between my monitor moved to the edge of my desk to the pillow on my bed ), which is why I usually have CDisplay set to display all pages at 1600 or 1800px high.

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The fact that physical manga is made this way is mostly determined by the need to print as few pages as possible. Since more pages = more costs, which leads to higher end price of the product... And too high a price - the less purchases it'll lead to.
If you look at webtoons, a lot of them are made in the long-strip mode. And it (IMO) leads to a better reader experience. Mostly because it cuts out the "micro-spoilers" you usually encounter when viewing a manga page as a whole.
Of course, when a webtoon gets a printed version published, it'll also be cut down and resized to fit the physical pages. But that just confirms the fact that manga doesn't have to be viewed the way its physical copies are made.
Perhaps if mangakas were first publishing their series online, they'd also switch to the more reader-friendly long-strip mode.

Last edited by Gradonil_Ral at 9:36 am, Dec 31 2015

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You can PM me if you need a temporary (freelance) cleaner/redrawer for some project. Especially if it's something with nice art.
Being the lazy person that I am, I'm not likely to accept anything long-term though.

I prefer a size between 1200 - 1600 so I voted medium in your poll.
I read manga mostly resized to view the whole page. If I want to see some more details there is still the option to use either a magnifiying glass tool in the reader software or to view the page fullsize.

Aside from the size there is still some other thing that annoys me, and that is filesize. Any single page file in my preferred size range that exceeds 500 KB (and with that I'm already being generous, most should stay between 200-400 KB) and double pages the double of that I consider uselessly bloated.