I am a little confused about something.   I own 80% of the states and I picked up DFW Ultra Res since that is my home town but I noticed on PC Aviator in the information sections that both products are sampled from 50CM resolution.   So if the state is 50CM and the Ultra Res is 50CM why would I get the city products if I already own the state?    Is it a different kind of 50cm?    Don't get me wrong, I am impressed with the DFW city.  I believe it is sharper at lower altitudes than the NE Texas State scenery I just want some clarification before I drop a bunch more money on more Ultra Res city products.   Can someone from PC Aviator or MSE chime in on what advantages the 50cm Ultra Res cities have over the 50cm state products?  Thanks!  Keep up the great work!

Probably because when you run anything thru resample.exe, you can choose the compression. usually 85 is the default. I am sure file sizes are what come into play, the lower the compression number, the smaller the file size. If you have the same source for all of texas, then running the state at 100% will create 40+ gigs for example, yet running just one city at a time at 100% will be better quality and smaller files to manage.

 

I agree with you though,if you are going to market me something that is high res, it had better come from another source and be at a higher res than the state source. 

Hi Kuragiman... Good question.

 

Both products have 50cm/pixel source imagery. Source is the key word. As pointed out above by Michael, there is a resample and compression algorithm applied to the source scenery to make filesizes manageable for full state releases, otherwise you end up with sizes of products that are not easily manageable by most. The compression has some effect on image clarity of course, and for most MSE 2.0 state products or country products, the data is resampled back to roughly 1m/pixel to keep product file size practical.

 

Now, resampling 50cm/pixel source imagery to 1m/pixel imagery in FSX retains more detail than simply starting with 1m/pixel source imagery. There is quite a noticeable difference in fact, hence why we start with the higher resolution source imagery.

 

For the Ultra-Res Cities, this 50cm/pixel source imagery is not compressed and hence all the detail is retained. The side effect is much larger file size, hence the coverage areas are smaller, although there is still quite a good amount of coverage for the UR cities... We cover the whole Terminal chart area for any of the cities featured in the Ultra-Res lineup.

 

In many cases, the source imagery used for the UR City packs is actually different than that used in the MSE 2.0 state packs. This is evidenced by different coloring in the imagery and resultant textures, often because the higher-res source images seem to be taken in Winter with a number of the releases. In some cases, the data may be the same or similar, I am not 100% sure (I am not the developer).

 

But hopefully that gives you a better idea of the difference?

I can vouch for a significant difference in the case of central California and of the San Francisco Ultra high resolution.  I was very pleased with the upgrade and did not regret the extra expense at all.  I was also impressed with the amount of ultra-high resolution coverage area extending beyond the city of San Francisco itself.  The area covered farther south than San Jose, as far north and east as Napa California.  Even if you don't know this area, the point is, it is a large coverage area.

Thanks for the explanation.  I noticed that the Dallas/Ft. Worth city I bought just crushed the resolution of the State level photoreal I have from MSE.   Great.   I'll be snagging up all the cities that are out then.   Gotta get a 3rd HDD though.  My other one is almost full!   Gotta be able to store those 400gigs of city data.  XD