When VectorMagic was originally released, I couldn’t believe it was free. I was vectorizing logos and artwork constantly. Then one day, everything changed. As they say; all good things must come to an end.

VectorMagic moved from the Stanford servers to their own dedicated domain. Shortly thereafter the free service ended and VectorMagic converted to a pay service. I was appalled at the prices, so I haven’t used the service since.

Tonight I received an Email from the guys at VectorMagic stating that they have restructured their pricing program and now for only $4.95 per month, you can vectorize and download an unlimited number of files. It seems like their former token-based pricing structure wasn’t working so well for them.

E-Mail From VectorMagic

Vector Magic Unlimited is now available – it’s a new subscription plan featuring unlimited downloads, giving you full tracing freedom without having to pick and choose which results to download.

Sign up now to lock in a price of only $4.95 per month:

There are no signup or termination fees and you can cancel at any time. If you have already purchased tokens, no problem: any remaining tokens in your account are fully creditable towards a subscription.

At roughly the price of a meal at the local fast food restaurant, this plan is a great deal for anyone who would like to trace as few as 2 images or more per month.

We’re very excited to be offering this new worry-free plan and hope that you will find it a great option.

What is Vectorizing?

It is the art of converting raster images to line art images format. Line art images are size independent. That means it can be scaled up and down without losing any quality.

The image will be of same quality no matter what size it is being scaled. To explain it better is to differentiate it to the raster image (bitmap image). Bitmap artwork is comprised of dots (pixels) that represent a graphic image, with each bit or group of bits corresponding to a pixel in the image. When Bitmap image is enlarged, it produces jagged edge and graininess, which is not print friendly. The bitmap file is comprised of a series of dots per inch (dpi) and when you enlarge a bitmap, rather than more dots being added, the existing dots are simply enlarged. The larger the dots get, the blurrier the image will be. Examples of Bitmap images are JPG, TIF, BMP and GIF.

While Vector artwork is simply comprised of lines (wireframe) that represent the objects. Vector images are usually created with the drawing program such as CorelDraw, Adobe Illustrator or Freehand. Increase or reduction in size will produce no pixelization . The combination of one of these programs with an expert digital artist can create a beautiful artwork that can be used on print articles.