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?

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!)

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?

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??

You should email 37Signals about your profound disappointment at how ineffective their "Campfire" product is for making S'mores.

Campfire is a metaphor for collaboration, that's different. He's named his product something specific that's materially incorrect.

Oh, my bad, I should have realized that, when you called out failing to capture the technical difference between rasterization and half-toning in a whimsical name for a service used to make dorm room posters by saying it was the same thing as describing a carwash as a magical engine conversion machine, we had entered the realm of literal equivalency.

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

I think a name sounding like "masturbator" is nicely aligned with their domain name: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homokaasu

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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"?

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