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	fancy printing facts
	Posted By: Anaphiel	Date: 6/6/02 4:18 p.m.
	In Response To: Re: Marathon Art Posters (Djof) Hey kids! Bet you didn't know that you don't have to print documents at the maximum resolution of the printer for them to look their best! Actually all you need is double the linescreen (fancy printing industry gibberish)of the output method. For example, most high-quality 4-color press work (book covers, etc.) are printed at 175 lpi, so anything higher than 350dpi is wasted. That makes your letter-sized image "only" 2500x3800 or so... Newspapers and a lot of desktop laser printers print at 85 lpi, so they need 170dpi, etc. But better still, most color laser printers and inkjet plotters only need about 200dpi to print at their best quality, and if you're going to have posters printed by professionals (even at a Kinko's or the like) they usually have software or hardware servers that can upsample (enlarge) images about a million times better than scaling the thing up in PhotoShop. As an example, the posters we put together for the M:R tournament were 3300x5500 pixels, which printed at terrific quality at 24x36, but we probably could have gone much smaller and still gotten good output if printed by a pro with good equipment. Most of the stuff I do is around that size, and I've printed lots of posters at 24x36" or larger, and all look good. The other thing to think about is cost. You can get an 11x17 printout pretty cheap ($2 or less usually), but a 24x36" poster might set you back $70-$80US. So just because you have a billion-dpi printer doesn't mean you have to feed it a billion-dpi image in order to get a good result. If you have a specific printer or printed size in mind lemme know, and I'll tell you how big the original image needs to be to print well. I doubt you'll find anything on-line that will print larger than 8x10 or so due to the file sizes. Proving once again that there are all kinds of geeks in the world... Anaphiel.

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Replies:

	Marathon Art Posters	Jeff Nosanov	6/4/02 11:01 p.m.
	Re: Marathon Art Posters	Callie21V	6/5/02 7:23 a.m.
	Re: Marathon Art Posters	M-Class	6/5/02 12:23 p.m.
	Re: Marathon Art Posters	Djof	6/5/02 4:23 p.m.
	fancy printing facts	Anaphiel	6/6/02 4:18 p.m.
	Re: fancy printing facts	Djof	6/6/02 10:03 p.m.
	Re: fancy printing facts	Anaphiel	6/7/02 6:43 a.m.
	Re: fancy printing facts	Tycho	6/7/02 11:40 a.m.
	Re: Marathon Art Posters	M-Class	6/7/02 2:03 p.m.

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