First impressions Samsung tablet, and a couple of questions

[davidedric]

Hi,

I initiated a thread a few days ago asking for tablet advice - thanks very much for the responses. I decided to buy a Samsung Tab2 10" device, which I've had three or four days.

Initial impressions of the device are good: it does what it says on the tin. The display is bright, and the processor seems fast enough. It's my first "proper" Android device, and that has a fairly steep learning curve after more than twenty years on Windows, but I am getting there.

I opted for the WiFi only version - I don't plan to be using it online out of the house, and again it works fine through my router.

Having shared my Lightroom directory on my PC, the tablet found it OK, and copying pictures to the tablet is a breeze.

There are of course thousands of apps, and probably hundreds for displaying/managing photos. You get Gallery with the device, I tried QuicPic but found it rather slow, and it seemed to increase picture noise over what I could see on my main monitor. I have opted for now for Album, which seems fast and accurate (for the princely sum of 81p).

First Question: Have you a recommended app? Photo management and display only, will do any PP on my PC.

It seems important to limit the size of the photographs
- There is a 16Gb internal SD card, and I currently have a 16Gb micro SD added, not a lot of storage
- It takes time to move the image from the SD card into RAM (the internal card seems a bit faster than the external)
- It takes time to render the image for the screen

I PP from RAW in LR, and then export a JPEG. The options seem to be either to resize the image, and/or to reduce the Quality. I don't want to resize right down to the screen size, because I want to be able to zoom in on detail (which works really well). Leaving the size as is, and taking the Quality down to 30 seems to give reasonable results, but I'll carry on playing;

Second Question: Any recommendations for the optimum settings, that you might have tried?

Thanks for reading, feedback very welcome.

[victor]

Dave,

Why not resize the images before transfer to the Tablet. I do this on my Ipad. Saves space. I export at 102 x 768 pixels @300 ppi direct from light room
Regards

David

[revi]

Seems like the problem is in reading the image from disk to memory. In that case,
the only solution would be to create smaller files. So yes, you'd have to resize or use a lower
quality setting (or both). Don't forget that if you want to zoom 2x, you need 4x as many pixels,
so that makes the file size go up fast.

And you can get some apparent quality loss when an image is scaled down to fit the screen. If you
store the images at the final screen size, you can prevent or at least minimise that.

Remco

[davidedric]

Why not resize the images before transfer to the Tablet. I do this on my Ipad. Saves space. I export at 102 x 768 pixels @300 ppi direct from light room

Fair question. The reason lies in the kind of images. They are mostly wildlife, so as well as the finished composition, I like to be able to zoom in on animal details - and I think I need the extra pixels to do that?