I’m looking into doing this with zazzle.com (anyone know of and have experience with them or other companies that do this)? I assume picture quality will basically be comparable to seeing it on any 480p TV screen of the same size as the poster, but I want to make sure before I spend $20+ doing it.
It’ll probably look terrible. For printing to look acceptable, you really need something like 300 dpi. You don’t say how large your poster is, but let’s assume 20 x 16. You get about 440 pixels (depending) in your TV picture, so that’s less than 30 dpi. You’d have to stand back a long ways from the poster not to notice that.
I agree with Finagle that it would look terrible–even from an HD picture. I disagree, however, that you need 300dpi to make a poster look okay. Unless people are looking very closely or you’re entering it in an art contest, you can do fine with 150-180 dpi. We use that for posters in our store all the time, and they come out fine.
440? Why not 640 x 480 = 307200 pixels?
Except a moving image always looks better than a still frame of similar quality, because the human brain can interpolate multiple frames and filter out the blur and noise. Hit “pause” and you’ll get some idea of how the poster would look.
You’re thinking of VGA computer graphics monitors. Which were higher resolution than televisions. Here’s a description of the NTSC broadcast protocol.
I believe the 440 is the referring the the horizontal resolution of the TV. You probably should be able to capture a 720 * 480 image as that is what dvds are recorded in. This still gives you a resolution of about 45 dpi (720/16") which is too low for printing. However you could ress this up in photoshop (or some such with good filters) to 150 dpi and then sharpen the picture. If you have a nice clean original capture, you should get good results.
THis is open to interpretation. When I was working for a publishing company, cover graphics were 600 dpi. Internal graphics were 300. When I worked designing mousepads, as a newbie, I submitted some files at 150 dpi. They looked awful and had to be redone at 300. It depends a great deal on the printer. A desktop inkjet, it’s gonna be hard to distinguish anything above 150. A really nice laser, or whatever the top of the line is nowadays, and there will be a big difference between 150 and 300. 600 might be overkill, but depending on the subtleties of the image and the purpose of the print, sometimes it might be justified.
It’s a Curb Your Enthusiasm DVD, recorded in 1.33:1, so I don’t get why it wouldn’t be 640 x 480. I’m not even remotely familiar with printers, but would dpi = dots per SQUARE inch? A 32 x 24 (768 in^2) poster with 307200 pixels would be 400 dpi, assuming one monitor pixel = one printer dot (I have no idea if this is the case).
dpi is dots per inch - in a straight line. This is the resolution of one line of a picture. It has nothing to do with area. That is why people are just talking about the 640 number. If you have a 16" line, and 640 dots of resolution, then your dpi is (640/16) 40 dpi. You can experiment with which looks better, 150 dpi, 300 dpi or 600 dpi. In all cases either the software or the printer has to make the picture bigger by adding dots (copying from other dots). You will not end up with the quality of a magazine print, but if you have a very clear original print, you can end up with an easy to identify blow up.