[ptx] Panopano.com

[Sebastian Nowozin]

Hi David,


David Grant wrote:

> Anyone know what happened to http://www.panopano.com?

Just for the record, the reasons:

  1. I moved back to Germany and the interest in panopano.com was too 
small to afford the effort to keep it running in China (though possible).

  2. Shipping problems: although we tried really hard, we were never 
able to find a satisfying shipping method.  Rolls were forbidden by the 
China Post (the monopolist for public postal services) or very expensive 
by commercial post companies catering businesses.  We ended up trying a 
number of different custom made sturdy boxes (the last so sturdy it can 
resist 80kg on it without cracking), but still around 20% of the 
shippings arrived broken.

  3. Quality problems: the printing business that did the prints for us 
were not able to provide consistently high quality prints.  Sometimes 
they used inks intended for year-long outdoor use, with a drawback of 
lacking color brilliance or even color bleeding.  High quality artistic 
inks with strong colors but less UV resistance were not consistently 
available to us and due to the few numbers of prints we produced they 
were not willing to provide this special requirements to us.


I hope you all understand and I wish you all fun with panorama making :)
If you find a satisfying low-priced custom-sized panorama printing 
service on the web, please recommend it to me so I can put a link on 
panopano.com, thanks.

Regards,
Sebastian