Re: Area 51 Panoramic


Message posted by lone wolf on October 31, 2005 at 12:24:55 PST:

I haven't seen the raw file, but if the image is from the buildings to the tanks, about 1200 pixels high would be pushing it given the photos I've shot. Put it this way: How good would a 35mm film image shot with a 50mm lens look blown up to 3ft high? It wouldn't look sharp if you got close to the image. Now take into account that the Tikaboo shots are done from 26 miles away through a telescope, so the quality would not be as good as the 50mm lens image. If the intent is a backdrop that will not be viewed close up, then you can blow it up as large as you want.

My two cents would be to keep the height around 12 inches, the reason being there are many photo quality digital printers that can handle that size, such as the Noritsu QSS 3211 (and varients), which are pretty common. That particular printer is 300dpi using LED illumination. The next step up are the LightJets, also very common. The advantage to using the Noritsu is the image is produced on ordinary photographic paper, so it will look like and last like a real photograph. The LightJet uses a special paper from Fuji that is supposed to be archival quality. It is laser illuminated and comes wider format. [I'm not sure of the limit, but I believe it's 3ft.] For those in the bay area, Cantoo in Berkeley has a few poster size LightJet images on display that were done with view camera (5 inch wide film) scanned on Imacons. Even then, they are not razor sharp. Lightwave Imaging in Berkeley has a display for their Noritsu of the image from the Mars rover. The quality is good, but the size as I stated is not as big.

Note that DPI on these printers is a real DPI, that is each pixel has the full range of color and intensity. When you use an inkjet printer, each pixel is usually the full saturation (unless you have a 6 or 8 color printer). Inkjet printers are probably about 30 DPI once they dither the ink to produce the full gamut.

Some commercial digital printers are really inkjets. They call the images glicee (SP?), but they are no better than what you could do on an Epson pnoto printer. In fact, they use a commercial varient of the Epson consumer printers. Bigger and built for continuous duty, but not better quality than the consumer gear.


In Reply to: Re: Area 51 Panoramic posted by Joerg (Webmaster) on October 31, 2005 at 8:23:05 PST:

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