I just now read on Flickr's D800 group a note posted by a member named Michigan Nut. His image made by a D700 is being used for billboards!! This along with the seemingly long wait for the D800 turned him off and he cancelled the D800, as he believes his D700 can print large enough!!!
it does not make much difference because every print is interpolated to native printer's resolution. Sure you can interpolate it better then printing software can, but rarely it makes so big difference that one would look at one and say: wow sharp, and at second: meh blurry.
AMaji wrote:
I just now read on Flickr's D800 group a note posted by a member named Michigan Nut. His image made by a D700 is being used for billboards!! This along with the seemingly long wait for the D800 turned him off and he cancelled the D800, as he believes his D700 can print large enough!!!
It can. However, that does not mean that any same-size large print from the D800 will not look even better. As noted before, I've printed 20x30 from 6MP. But I've also printed 20x30 from 24MP and boy, is there a difference.
A friend's photo taken in Mongolia with a D200 was used by a museum in Istanbul for a show they were mounting on the subject of Mongolia. It appeared at the entrance and was perhaps six feet high and ten feet wide. There are ways, and there are ways...
I too have done 20x30 and 24x36 no problem and it looks sharp and those are cropped images on metal and it looks really good. If you stand say 1 inch away it looks good but it really shines when you 4 to 6 feet away. The more mega pixel printing bigger the more detail but it also helps where you place the image and where people will be looking at it from.
At Service Photo in Baltimore the guys have a print that I believe is 20x30" or so and it's a shot of Ray Lewis of the Baltimore Ravens taken with a D2h and that looks fine from about 6 feet. I think as long as the photo is exposed correctly and in perfect focus you can print it very large. I also remember that video on youtube from a British tech show where they enlarged a D700 raw file to cover a building and compared it to a print from an F5 of the same size and it looked better than the F5's print. I'm sure close up it was artifacted to all hell but you get the idea.
There comes a point that when you're printing realllly big, that megapixels dont matter as much as printing just "big"....i think that point (in most cases) falls somewhere around 7ft wide....at that size, your viewing distance is (generally) huge, and really ANY file is going to be interpolated to print that size...i think for between 30" and 60", MP's matter a lot more, cause viewing distance can be much less than what's "proper"....
You can print pretty huge it just depends how close you want to look at it. I saw decent billboard made from 6 mpix (cause well, there was time when 12 mpix was a lot ). If you want large (A2) and detailed, either pano stitches or different camera.
Just keep in mind that if you print 12 mpix big, you wont hide anything what is wrong with photo. So those small invisible errors on web-size can be quite visible..
Kittyk wrote:
it does not make much difference because every print is interpolated to native printer's resolution. Sure you can interpolate it better then printing software can, but rarely it makes so big difference that one would look at one and say: wow sharp, and at second: meh blurry.
i would not be so sure about that when done properly. lets say we don't work in the same realm and i use tools for making larger then normal work.
no you aren't going to blow up to a 12'x16' image and place it so that one can analyze it from 5ft away. you ratio it for the display and distance you need. so please don't take it out of context as i did have a two parts to my inquiry that referenced visual acquity distance
). If you want large (A2) and detailed, either pano stitches or different camera. 