David: Please introduce yourself and tell us what you do.

Steve: My name is Steve Kozel and I am President of Pixel Outpost. I have been in the graphics business since 1980. Prior to this startup, I was CEO of O.N.E. Color Communications, which was a 89 year old company specializing in creative retouching and assembly for the San Francisco advertising agencies (Goodby, FCB, Publicis) as well as corporate packaging clients (Dreyers, Safeway, Clorox). We sold O.N.E. to a public company, Matthews International, in 2003 and I left in 2004.

David: My understanding is you have a service that prints very large format photographs. Can you tell me about it?

Steve: The idea to start Pixel Outpost was born from a trip in the summer of 2004. I had taken some great shots with a Nikon D70 and wanted to get large prints on canvas. I found I could get them, but not nearly as easily as I know it could have been. The web-based large format print option for consumers is generally unknown.

By focusing solely on this niche, we bring some cool options to the photo hobbyist and we help open up a new world of imaging options to the regular digital camera user. Our niche is fast, easy and competitively priced large prints on a variety of substrates.

David: Is it really possible to create a high-quality very large print from a consumer digital camera? How?

Steve: Though many are skeptical, we have had tremendous feedback from clients who are impressed by the quality of the large prints we produce. The fast growing megapixel count on digital cameras and the advent of prosumer digital SLR's enable great shots to get "big". You view an 8x10 image very differently than a 23x36 image, and our large images are typically viewed from [a distance of] 36 inches and beyond, so visually our prints look very similar to the color and clarity of a standard print.

David: I noticed you print on different paper types as well as canvas. Are you printing on real, art-style canvas or is it a textured paper?