Vince Maskeeper
Senior HTF Member
- Joined
- Jan 18, 1999
- Messages
- 6,500
I know many here have opted for buying their own printers in the home. And while that might be an option down the road, I'm wondering about what commerical services you guys have used for printing digital images.
I recently conducted an experiment using the local Walmart: I took 4 images, one using each resolution setting on the camera and featuring a shot of a newspaper. I checked each one on the pc- and obviously, as the resolution increased, the newspaper text got more and more readable.
However, when the prints were returned, at 4x5 there really was almost no difference between the images. There was a slight differnce between 640x480 and 1024x768, however going from 1024x768 to 1600x1200 to 2048x1536 seemed to show almost no improvement at 4x5--- at least almost no improvament I could see on the prints with the naked eye.
I am wondering if this is really a limitation of my eyes at these higher resolutions, or if its possible that the walmart photo printer maxes out around 300 dpi and so the added resolution of the higher res formats was essentially wasted.
It seems that 2048 images should be a nice 400 dpi when printed that size-- but, as I said above, the fine detail in the newsprint did not seem to improve much versus lower 1600 and 1024 resolution version (which should have been 300dpi and 200dpi respectively).
So I was wondering if anyone else has tried this type of experiment, if anyone here has a printing method they absolutely swear by (something that i can take a cdr or flash key to, and order up affordable 4x5 prints). Are there differences in the processes or inks (is it possible to develop digital images with a more photochem like process, is there any advantage)?
Are there some of these services that are really doing better work than others? Or are they all basically the same stuff??
-V
I recently conducted an experiment using the local Walmart: I took 4 images, one using each resolution setting on the camera and featuring a shot of a newspaper. I checked each one on the pc- and obviously, as the resolution increased, the newspaper text got more and more readable.
However, when the prints were returned, at 4x5 there really was almost no difference between the images. There was a slight differnce between 640x480 and 1024x768, however going from 1024x768 to 1600x1200 to 2048x1536 seemed to show almost no improvement at 4x5--- at least almost no improvament I could see on the prints with the naked eye.
I am wondering if this is really a limitation of my eyes at these higher resolutions, or if its possible that the walmart photo printer maxes out around 300 dpi and so the added resolution of the higher res formats was essentially wasted.
It seems that 2048 images should be a nice 400 dpi when printed that size-- but, as I said above, the fine detail in the newsprint did not seem to improve much versus lower 1600 and 1024 resolution version (which should have been 300dpi and 200dpi respectively).
So I was wondering if anyone else has tried this type of experiment, if anyone here has a printing method they absolutely swear by (something that i can take a cdr or flash key to, and order up affordable 4x5 prints). Are there differences in the processes or inks (is it possible to develop digital images with a more photochem like process, is there any advantage)?
Are there some of these services that are really doing better work than others? Or are they all basically the same stuff??
-V