First, how much noise is too much? I've taken pics at 800 ASA which are not very noisy. I'm using Photoshop CS for the conversion (the plugin is marvelous and you can do colour noise reduction as well as luminance smoothing). I couldn't say that I would see any (excessive) noise after the conversion from RAW files.

As for the size. Yes, 3008 x 2008 is the highest resolution (since it is the native resolution of the detector chip of the *istD). I've ordered A2 prints and found them to be brilliant. I ordered at photobox in the UK. They print at 254 dpi, so I increased the resolution in Photoshop (stepwise at 5 - 10%) to the print resolution (5939 x 4200 for A2). This does not increase the noise. Certainly on one of the pictures that I took at 400 ASA and enlarged to A2 there is some noise discernible if you get really close, but I find it quite acceptable.

If you go to http://www.photoboxgallery.com/Prieni look at the Hawaii collection. I've printed 'Devastation trail' and 'Hawaii volcanoe' in A2. The volcanoe picture was taken at 400 ASA. Both of the pictures were taken in JPEG mode, using RAW mode you have even better possibilities to adjust the pictures when importing to Photoshop.

I haven't tried much with slow shutter speeds and higher ASA. If I need long exposures I have to use a tripod anyway and thus can afford even slower shutter speeds at 200 ASA. Oh, just remembered, I'm lying here: Inadvertently I used 800 ASA at a series of night shots. One of them is
http://home.fotocommunity.de/prieni/index.php?id=419896&d=1465635
which was taken at 1/4s, A 8.0. It didn't seem noisy to me, though. Only problem was that I had a bit of a halo around the 'John Lewis' sign, so I had to patch it up in Photoshop (you can see a black rectangle behind the sign, that's where I did the patch up). If you like I can prepare some 100% cuttings and send them via email.

Hope this helps,
Prieni

Hi Matt,

forgot to say: For the new version they are incorporating support for RAW files and I made sure that the *istD is supported. It already works, so I've been assured.
You can add keywords and search for them but that's as far as it goes at the moment. Also the keywords are stored in 'their' files rather than in EXIF data. It has been mentioned on the forum but I don't know what suggestions will make it to the next version. After all it's intended mostly for the bog-standard digital shooter sorting the family pictures...
I love the look-and-feel though.

Cheers,
Prieni

I'm using Picasa from Lifescape http://www.picasa.net It doesn't have the offline capability you're asking for but there's a new version in the making and it might have that feature (I'll let you know here when it's eventually out). There are a few weak points but all in all I'm quite happy with it. I'm at around 4000 images on the disk and it's reasonably quick on my machines, the slower of which is a 800 MHz Pentium III.
If you want to try it, have a look around in their WEB-Forum as well http://forums.picasa.net/ , that will show the gripes and wished for features.

Prieni

Well, I guess it's the same. Does your EXIF data contain equivalent focal lengths? If not, you would have to find out the size of the chip in the Optio and convert the focal lengths yourself.
HTH, Prieni

I just got my first A2 print back from PhotoBox and are quite pleased with the result. I uploaded an image from the *istD that I have blown up in 5% steps in PS up to their resolution (254 dpi for A2, ending up with 5940 x 4200 pixels).
As expected from their calibration print, it's a tad yellowish, as I expected. Also their cutting tolerances seem to be around 1 mm (I had a black 1 mm frame around the picture and that got cut off at either short side and one long side with a 1 mm white frame on one long side).
The quality is very good and they also have a poster offer in March with 30% off. Total cost with P&P was £11.99 (£15.49 without poster offer). Seems pretty reasonable to me.
Thought you might be interested to read about this.

I didn't say it was totally useless. There might be people who don't want to go through the conversion from RAW to TIFF themselves but don't want to loose anything by JPEG compression. However, the TIFF feature would have been more useful if they had put in a lossless compression like LZW.
If you don't mind doing the conversion than TIFF has no advantage over RAW and with RAW you have the comfort of doing further adjustment without any loss. With TIFF you loose that freedom AND the pictures take more space on your card or drive in the camera.

Who needs TIF's on the *istD? They are even bigger than the RAW files and you can't do the same post-processing.

Thanks Matt.

I downloaded Wyziwyg and went through the calibration of my display. However, I ended up with a quite yellowish picture (gray being very brownish). Anyway, that might adjust for the majority of the prints I got from Jessops (the o.k. ones) being a tad darker than on the monitor. But it doesn't explain why some pics are coming out too bright.
You say that photobox don't tweak the photos, the Jessop man said they don't do that either (and again, for the o.k. ones that seems to be true). Seems that the machine is doing something to some photos. To make matters worse it's doing that in an unpredictable fashion
Maybe I try Photobox next time round and there's always the last resort of printing them out myself (although that comes out much more expensive, at least for small prints).
That brings me to another question: Where can I get A3 size prints? Would I need to increase resolution or would 3008 x 2008 be o.k.?

Prieni

After a holiday trip I gave my digital pictures (on CD) to my local Jessops branch (287 pics 7x5). Most of the pictures were really good (although a bit darker than I would have expected but that could well be my monitor setting). However, 25 of them didn't turn out well, most of these being 'overexposed' i.e. details in light areas were gone. These light pictures seemed nothing different from the o.k. ones on the screen (neither gave looking at the histograms any clues).
On the weekend I went back to them to find out what's happening. I was told that they don't do anything to the pictures once they are sent from the 'editing station' (or whatever they call the fancy PC where you put your media in and select/edit your pictures). So that begs the question what the machine is doing to them. It's rather odd, since I had the same motive shot twice, once in landscape once in portrait. On the screen they look the same, the histograms look very similar, but one came out too light and the other one o.k.
Can anyone shine light on this one or has had the same experience? What print services do you use?

P.S.: After looking at the pictures on CD and the prints I got a refund on the prints (on their own suggestion!) which is very nice, but it would have been even nicer to know what's happening to avoid it next time round...

Got mine in December; I really love it. A few shots you can see at
http://www.fotocommunity.de/pc/pc/mypics/419896
page is in German though, and not all shots are made with the *istD.