A: Although we refer to our products as "fine art prints", we don't mean that in the traditional "Art world" sense of the term. We simply mean that these are high quality prints of fine art images.

However, the prints for sale in our digital art and photography galleries are not "posters" in the sense in which that term is usually applied to art. Typically, a "poster" is a reproduction of an original object (usually a painting). Our prints are multiple originals produced directly from the digital file which constitutes the "work" of art. Each print is an example (or "iteration") of the piece - not a reproduction.

Q: Why are your posters more expensive than those at other Internet poster sites?

A: Our prints (we don't call them "posters") are produced one-at-a-time, on demand as they are ordered, using the finest digital fine art printmaking technologies available. Traditional mass-marketed posters are printed in advance in quantities of thousands (making them cheap per piece but greatly limiting the range of images which can be offered), and are of much lower quality in terms of paper, ink, and detail.

To give you a sense of the differences involved, our prints on watercolor paper use a heavy fine art stock specially coated for use with digital printers, which costs us $12 per 32 x 44" sheet (this is just for the paper itself, before ink and many other printing costs). The posters you can buy at a poster store typically use paper which costs about 50 cents for the same size.

The trade off for customers ordering our prints is that they pay more money for a much higher quality print - with a much, much wider selection.

Q: Won't artists selling their work in inexpensive "open" editions undermine their marketability in the traditional gallery world? My dealer would never let me do this!

A: PODpublishing is still an experiment, of course, and it may be a long time (if ever) before royalties from selling prints in open editions amount to more money than a brick-and-mortar gallery dealer can generate from his or her "collectors".

Still, we think history is on our side. The movement in every art form in the last century has been away from expensive "authentic" and "unique" experiences and toward inexpensive multiple and repeatable ones. Visual art sold in open editions fits that bill perfectly.

By the way, how many artists do you think are actually making any money in the traditional gallery world?

Q: Do you seriously expect art collectors to pay for these "open edition" digital art prints?

A: We disagree with the implication that art can only succeed as an investment for wealthy collectors. Many people "collect" music, literature and film as inexpensive open edition multiples - in other words as compact disks, books, and videotapes. Each of these markets amounts to more than $15 billion annually in the United States - more than $45 billion total. The current American market for new contemporary art is less than $1 billion per year - despite the vastly higher cost per "piece".

Q: Will PODgallery ever consider letting customers download files they want and print them themselves? (Once they provide a credit card number, of course!) Would this subvert your mission of selling prints?

A: The average consumer's printer is probably small (letter size) and uncalibrated. So the variability of color, quality, substrates, etc. would pose problems. Most of our artists wouldn't want their work available for such a use.

However, we are very interested in the future of digital frames - large flat panel displays mounted on a wall for viewing art. Downloading art for a small charge per piece (or a monthly subscription) may open up a whole new economic model for artists.

Q: If PODgallery artworks are available in many different sizes, from several different types of printer, how can artists (and your clients) be assured that the work is being presented as intended?

A: We calibrate all of our monitors and output devices to a single, independent digital target (a version of Adobe Photoshop's "Ole No Moiré" file) so that everything we produce will be as closely calibrated to everything else as possible.

Our attitude towards the scale of a digital image is that it is inherently variable - - pixels have no physical dimension until one is assigned to them. All of our artists give us their work in what we call its "native resolution" (the number of pixels they originally used for a piece, which might be high or low) knowing that we will offer it for sale in a range of sizes.

Q: I had an opportunity to see a show of PODgallery prints at Spectra Digital Arts Gallery and found them absolutely breathtaking - on the Internet though, the same pieces lose much of their power. Do your artists find that showing work online limits the viewers' ability to experience their "vision" of the piece?

A: Showing a low resolution, highly compressed version of a work of art over the Internet is a bit like listening to music on a tinny little transistor radio.

But music played on the radio is also intended to spur sales of records for home stereos - a better experience of the work. By the same token, we're hoping that work seen online will still show viewers enough to encourage them to buy a print.

Q: What do see as the appropriate arena for digital art in the long term? Is it a print-based medium such as PODgallery advocates, or a web-based, interactive form, or a new way to make original objects for traditional galleries?

Although we are currently focused on marketing prints, our expectation is that "digital frames" (flat-panel wall-mounted displays) will change this discussion in the near future. The last interesting question for digital art may be to define the differences between "ambient" works suited to a digital frame, "interactive" pieces suited to a computer, and "narrative" pieces which demand a focused but passive audience - perhaps in front of a television.

From our perspective, still digital images (and eventually, non-narrative digital animations) are perfectly suited to the digital frames now coming to market from companies like Kodak, Ceiva and Sony. These "Internet Appliances" can display "ambient" Internet content that doesn't warrant tying up a PC or television set : downloaded family photos, stock market reports, weather reports... and art.