Well, Elson, the answer really lies in how close the viewer is going
to view the image. Last summer I had a 4 foot x 6 foot poster made
of an image I took on 35mm Provia 100F. I took the slide to my
technician and he scanned it and output the file at actual size x
200dpi. The buyer displayed the poster in the roof of a canvas tent
at a large regatta fund raiser. I had the poster professionally
printed onto canvas material.
It looked great but noone was closer than 15 feet to it.
On the other side, I remember going into Galen Rowell's gallery when
it was in Albany, CA, near Berkeley. Sunrise over Potala Palace was
on display at 24"x36". He shot that on the old Kodachrome 25. The
print was horribly grainy when you stood in front of it.
And in the middle, the other day I had my technician print a 12x18
from a17M file of sailboats off of which I had cropped about 1/4 from
one side and maybe 1/8 from the bottom. I uprezzed the file in
Photoshop to 300 dpi. The file was large, around 63M, after I
uprezzed it. I shot it at 200 ISO to begin with so it wasn't
suffering from any excess camera-induced grain.
He printed it on Epson glossy photo paper which comes 13x19.
There is visible grain in the bald sky but all the edges are
terrifyingly crisp.
--
Emily L. Ferguson
mailto:elf@xxxxxxxx
508-563-6822
New England landscapes, wooden boats and races, press photography
http://www.vsu.cape.com/~elf/
