I have an awesome colour map of the Paris Catacombs.
The map, beautifully done, is a 7000 x 7000 JPEG and I would like to have it printed in full color, in one piece, without any loss in resolution.
Can anyone recommend where I might get it printed?
Thanks!
How big?
Also, are you the copyright holder? If you’re not, you might have trouble getting it printed at many places. If you are the copyright holder, MPix does beautiful prints up to 20x30". Just upload and print.
a 7000x7000 pixel image is 90 some odd inches square. That’s almost an 8ft by 8ft poster. Look to a real print shop (not kinko’s or quickiprint). They can usually make it that big AND put it on something other than cheap copy paper.
Standard printing is done at 300dpi.
7000/300 dpi = 23.33 inches
Anyplace that prints poster size can handle that.
Thanks you all for your answers.
Actually, after reading your posts, I think I’m misunderstanding the printing process.
I think I need to be asking two questions:
What is the highest dpi printing available? In other words, what is the smallest printed size which will retain full resolution?
Also, how large can I print a 7000 x 7000 image before it starts to look grainy, etc… I guess that’s completely subjective and also dependent on view distance…
Some imagesetters go as high as 4800 dpi. This means your image would be 1.4583 inches across. It would easily fit on a standard business card.
I know someone who has art-quality poster-size prints done in Toronto. Last I looked into it, they charged about $10/square foot and up. but that was a while ago.
Here’s the place: Toronto Image Works. They charge $310 for setup and $435 for giclée printing of a 44-inch by 84-inch artwork; or $440 for the first print of a 44-inch x 120-inch poster by the Chromira process.
This is not your typical Kinkos. Kinkos charges $10 per square foot for wide-format prints comparable in quality to regular consumer printers.
300 dpi is the standard photo printing number. You can go as low as 200 dpi and still retain very good image quality. Without seeing your map image it’s hard to say what your image would require.
There’s not a lot of reason to go higher then 300 dpi unless your image has extremely fine detail, and that will depend on how your image was created. To some degree you’ll just be throwing data away beyond that.
This can also get very confusing. Many printers are marketed at very high dpis, but print DPIs of 1200 or 2400 the effective resolution is still usually around 300 dpis. This is because for the print DPI, many more droplets of ink (drops) may be required to reproduce a single color accurately.
Yes, but a printer is not an imagesetter.
Just making sure.
Imagesetters don’t print color dots, so 4800 DPI is useless.
The highest color resolution for conventional printing is in the 300 dpi range.
I have worked in commercial printing. 300 DPI is the minimum for color
At least 600 dpi and 600 (photo) and 1200 (drawings) dpi, actually for standard printers.
The Xerox DocuColor 7000 (pdf) digital press does up to 600 dpi in colour too.
One thing you have to realize is that print size and dpi are interrelated. A 7000 pixel by 7000 pixel can be printed at 2 dpi if you print it large enough. A 4"x6" postcard at 300dpi becomes 150dpi if you print it at 8" x 12". Like was said above, you want to keep at 300dpi if possible, but if the image is only going to be seen from a distance and there isn’t very small detail you can probably make do with a dpi smaller than that.
Most places you can order just one print from aren’t going to have anything that can print over 60". And in my experience even that is rare. Any place with a large format printer can get you a decent print at 300dpi and 2’ x 2’ for less than $100. Probably less than $50 depending on the market.
And even FedEx Kinko’s can do it. Unless the branch is way tiny they all have 36"+ large format printers. In fact they often have specials where they mount and laminate an 18"x24" poster for less than $50.
I said conventional printing, not laser printing.
I’d bet good money that a conventional (halftoned, offset) print at 300dpi would knock the doors off the 600dpi laser print. Color laser printers stink. A $90 inkjet can do a better job. I have both.
It’s nearly meaningless to just quote DPI numbers as a measure of the quality of printing unless you add some context such as halftone frequency.
A 2400 dpi imagesetter can indeed draw 2400x2400 black or white dots in a given square inch, all individually addressable. This means you can produce a 2400 dpi black and white image with no levels of gray. This is not very useful, but I’ve done it.
Now instead of just having 2400 dots per inch, imagine that you divide this 2400x2400 into little 2x2 cells of dots. There are 1200 of these cells per inch, and each cell has four dots that can either be on or off, meaning the cell can be all white, all black, or a few shades in between (1 of the 4 dots black, 2 of the 4, or 3 of the 4). This makes your 2400dpi printer into a 1200dpi printer if you only need 5 different levels of gray (0, 25, 50, 75 and 100%).
Now imagine that the 2400dpi is divided into larger cells of 8x8. Now each cell has 257 different levels of gray it can display, but you only have 300 of these cells per inch. This is what it means to say that usually, even commercial printing has an effective resolution of 300dpi. Each color plane (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) is technically 2400 dpi, but it’s divided up into little cells in order to give better control of color levels, so there are really only 300 individually settable “pixels” of color per inch. This is a process called halftoning.
Interestingly, even though there are higher resolution imagesetters than 2400dpi (as the 4800dpi mentioned), halftone dots still tend to get printed at around 300 per inch (“lines per inch” in halftone terminology), because in traditional offset printing, there are limits to how small and close together you can make ink dots without them losing their shape and/or running together on the paper.
But the bottom line is that if you printed your 7000x7000 JPEG on a business card using a 4800dpi imagesetter, it would look like garbage, either because it would be downsampled to 300dpi and halftoned, or because it would be printed at 4800dpi but with 1-bit color fidelity.
I used to print on a machine that had 101,600 dots per inch (1.03 e 10 dots per square inch).
Top that!
Since when is laser printing not conventional?