Hi all,
I’m working on a piece that I’m going to want to get printed out and framed. However, I’m not sure how well things scale because I’ve never printed out any of my art before.
If I have a BMP which is 1280 x 1024 pixels, how big can my printout be before I start losing quality?
Anyone printed out this stuff before?
Regards
Caleb
I do print stuff regularly as I have a high-end color machine available in my company. You can easily print that size to a 8 by 11 inch sheet for a fairly good result. For a larger sheet (A3 or 11 by 16 inch) you need something like 2400 x 1600 pix resolution to have a picture of good print quality. Mind you that the max print resolution that your machine can do has a lot of influence on the result as well.
OK - 8x11 inches sounds around the size I’m looking for.
When you say “fairly good” do you mean excellent?
This is going to be a gift and I want it to look as good as possible.
Caleb.
no, there will be visible artifacts, but you’d have to look pretty close
but it really depends what you are comfortable with, and what your printer can do well. inkjets usually don’t really do a perfect job [you can usually see artifacts if you look close], but often this is because it is a cheap inkjet or it is misconfigured or using the wrong paper [the difference in quality on two types of paper is bigger than you’d think]
honestly, unless this person is particularly picky I don’t think they’d care
if they were particuarly picky, I’d think they would complain about the render before the image quality
personally I’d suggest you do things at 300dpi [so, for 8x11 that would be 2400x3300 pixels], or 600 if you can live with an image that big
[iirc magazines are printed at 300dpi]
I’m going to get this done at a printers place - so I’m thinking more along the lines of professional. Presumably that would mean that I don’t have to worry about the printer they’re using.
Thanks for the info re artifacts. I’ll have to consider whether I want to wait for the year it will take my computer to render 2400x3300. 
Caleb
z3r0 d’s advice is close to complete, although 300 dpi is already very high quality, meaning you need a magnifying glas to see the print raster. For near-photographic quality 150 dpi is good enough. But as I said before, the max resolution that the printer can manage is the upper limit. You also get the best results if you match the printer-resolution exactly because that way there will be no interpolation calculations being done on the image while printing. Interpolation can create artifacts similar to jpg-compression (not exactly but you get the point). If you have a high-end printer available (like when you go to a professional printshop or such) then you don’t have to mach the printer resolution as those printers don’t do interpolation, they have such high resolutions that it is no problem anyway.
The colorprinter I have here does seperate prints for each CMYK layer at 1200 dpi, rotating each layer resulting in 4800 dpi print quality. When I print pictures from my 4 megapixel camera to a 11x16 inch sheet I get photographic quality at about 150 dpi image quality.
Guys - I have another question relating to this.
I am doing a massive render (3600 x 2400) for the item I’m going to print and last time I checked on the process the edges looked quite pixilated and nasty.
I’m wondering if this is because my screen is at 1200x1024 approx and the resolution of the render is much large meaning that my screen is buggering up pixels trying to fit the picture on the screen?
Sorry - there is probably a much more impressive word like interpolating instead of “buggering up pixels”.
Anyway - just checking.
Caleb
yes - blender uses a quick, not too precise method to scale down rendered images while displaying them. the final will be ok.
Phew!
Thanks for that.
I hate the idea of wasting so much time on a render that’s going to look shit.
Caleb