I get "Invalid email address" for my email so they are applying some sort of aggressive filtering on their email acceptance anyways which IMO is a really bad sign they are building an email list they want to profit from.
If you look at their pricing model, which is 4 free... sign up for paid plan to get more then the aggressive email validation makes a bit more sense. I'm not connected to them in any way, just trying to give the benefit of the doubt.
I tried on a larger color picture that was taken with a low quality phone camera and received entirely unimpressive results. It was hard to tell if anything had even been done.
I would pay for this in a heartbeat if this was a desktop app I could use offline. On the cloud I'm not so sure. With all the stories going around HN I barely trust Facebook and Google with my photos.
Such services won't realistically be a desktop app, since that pretty much requires them to give away their service and "secret sauce" in a way that's infinitely reusable / copyable for anyone who cares enough to extract it.
The usual situation for services like this is that it either runs on their servers, or you're willing a to pay sufficiently large amount to make it worth the full standard enterprise B2B sales process, a negotiated contract incl NDAs and liability and for them to do an on-site installation. So if you're a big organization that wants to care about trade secrets or classified information, then it can be arranged, but it's not manageable for individual consumers or small businesses.
Alas, the "secret sauce" is already freely available: http://waifu2x.udp.jp/. The only real difference is the (very, very appreciable) effort to make it commercialized software. Anybody who cares enough to disassemble it for reuse could build the core tech themselves.
Looking at that project on github[1] I can't help but to think the algorithm need to upsample anime images (like in this project) might be different than the one needed to upsample photos. Anime has the benefit of having a lot of sections of solid colors.
Edit: Actually looking at the source further it appears they also have models for photos as part of that project in addition to the model for anime.
(again that's the guy who did letsenhance) - waifu2x is great for anime, and in some rare cases it even outperforms us. In all the rest of cases - we are 1 head up from waifu, bigjpg, srgan, etc. Feel free to compare.
LetsEnhance CTO here. I shamelessly grabbed part of our GPU cluster yesterday for experiments with new nets and infrastructure. Didn't expect this HN thread coming out :)
Hey guys, that's Alex - creator of Let's Enhance. Tool is great and blah-blah, but I see you are reeeealy frustrated with our email/registration policy. Ok, hands clear here - no email list selling, we just want to earn some buck from professional users and give regular guys a way to use it for free. That's why we require a real email or FB acc. TBH, IF some of you can come up with a better strategy that will be more polite to users, keep our cloud cheap (when we were 100% free I burned lots of cash just it keep it running in GPU cloud), etc, etc. Really, no BS here – marketing advice is really welcomed here.
>but I see you are reeeealy frustrated with our email/registration policy
No, they're frustrated that you aren't up front about it. Trying to BS around the actual problem just makes it worse. I really couldn't imagine giving money to a company engaging in such tactics, I feel like I'd have to have a lawyer go over every last detail to ensure I'm getting what I expect.
24 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 60.4 ms ] threadThe usual situation for services like this is that it either runs on their servers, or you're willing a to pay sufficiently large amount to make it worth the full standard enterprise B2B sales process, a negotiated contract incl NDAs and liability and for them to do an on-site installation. So if you're a big organization that wants to care about trade secrets or classified information, then it can be arranged, but it's not manageable for individual consumers or small businesses.
Edit: Actually looking at the source further it appears they also have models for photos as part of that project in addition to the model for anime.
[1] https://github.com/nagadomi/waifu2x
Anything else I could say about their tactics would be less than charitable.
What a dick move! Why not say I need to give you my email from the start?
No, they're frustrated that you aren't up front about it. Trying to BS around the actual problem just makes it worse. I really couldn't imagine giving money to a company engaging in such tactics, I feel like I'd have to have a lawyer go over every last detail to ensure I'm getting what I expect.