San And Their Inability To Provide Good Scans

Does this chap anyone else's hide?

Looking at some lots in upcoming auctions I find it very annoying to click on a single stamp lot and get a smaller image than the preview.

Rant over.

Yes, it is frustrating - that's on the auction house not providing good enough images for their listings. There's a huge variation between auction houses that provide good images and those that provide few, or none at all.

Yup, drives me nuts.

Getting to where I'm only bidding on stamps with a cert, tired of dealing with all the junk.

" click on a single stamp lot and get a smaller image than the preview."

I have seen the same silliness

Has caused more grief than I care to talk about.

Sometimes the auction house web site has better scans than those available through SAN. Rumsey is a good example of this.

Isn't the issue the auction houses rather than SAN?

SAN isn't loading the auction lots and scans, the companies are.

SAN is "just" the website.

I completely agree clicking on an image should never be smaller than the thumbnail. That is a website issue...

Ok I talk a little. My trouble actually troubles were with Rasdale over Beer stamps. I knew a lot . He knew nothing. Poor consigners of deceased estate got screwed. Anyway the other problem were the scans on SAN. Much better on Rasdale. Rasdale banned me on SAN but I am ok on Rasdale after he realized the error of his ways.

It is much easier to view scans on Rasdale than on SAN, it is probably the same images but the navigation from image to image is completely different.

The Rumsey APS auction has a lot of pdfs on their website that aren't available on SAN at all.

Well, it does take two to tango.
But someone's gotta lead, otherwise toes will be stepped on.

Explaining why clicking on an image can be smaller than the thumbnail.

So all of our thumbnails are dynamically presented at 250 pixels. This is a good compromise. Too little you lose resolution, too large takes up to much space. Most auction houses provide images with more resolution, so if you click on the image you get a larger image. Though we encourage all auction houses to give us higher resolution images, some give us images that are smaller than 250 pixels, and so when you look at the actual image, it is smaller. There are only a few auction houses that do that (in fact I can only think of one). StampAuctionNetwork being the driving force for auction houses to get on-line catalogs since 1994 has really made a difference here and essentially created the de facto standard that if you want to sell anything, you must provide a scan. When we started very few auction houses felt the need to provide separate scans for each lot. Now they all do. And we made that possible, both with their enterprise software and StampAuctionNetwork itself.

In addition to higher resolution images, I'd very much like to see the standard right click options to save image as and open image in new tab.

There is an (image) link on all StampAuctionNetwork descriptions that you can click on to get the image.

I think Tom Droege's number is slightly off, and what he meant to say is that all thumbnail images on SAN are presented at 300 pixels wide. By "dynamically presented", he is referring to the way the browser handles the image to present it at 300 pixels wide regardless of the actual image size sent by the auction house.