20D, How Big Can You Go?

[MDJAK]

I just purchased the Epson Stylus Pro 4000 and have printed a few 16x20 prints after resizing in Photoshop CS. For the most part, they look very good.

Is there any hard and fast rule, or otherwise, for how big a print one could or should be able to get out of the 20D? I'm dying for the 1Ds Mark II.

Thanks

[Scottes]

It all depends on original quality & sharpness, upsizing technique, and most importantly viewing distance. I've got a couple of 20x30s from my 10D that look great from 5 feet away, but they don't hold up to close inspection.

[JK]

...and most importantly viewing distance.
That's indeed the most important aspect. Given a printer big enough and a few oil tankers full of ink, you could make a print from the 20D that's big enough to view from the moon! :D

[tim]

I'm having a shot taken by a 300D blown up to A1 size - 80 cm by 50 cm (32 x 22 inches). I did a few crops at 100% on 6*4s and it looked fine so long as you didn't stand too close. I'll post next week when I have it, if I forget and you really want to know how it goes PM me next week :)

Edit - I just corrected my units :oops:

[Canuck]

I nailed a pic on the 10D (6.3MP) that can be printed at 20x30, 200+ DPI.

[Olegis]

The largest print I did was almost 20x30 inches, actually it was 50x70cm - it looks great on my parents wall (made with 10D and the Tamron 28-75 f/2.8, printed in a professional lab) ! This is the picture (http://www.pbase.com/olegis/image/33200237) , by the way :cool:

[tim]

Nice pic oleg!

The one i'm getting printed 32x22 is this one (http://www.mrwild.co.nz/PhotoGallery/2004/NewYears/slides/CRW_4701.html). btw I edited my post above, i'm getting it printed 80cm wide, not 80 inches wide!

[Olegis]

Thanks tim. You're not bad yourself, either ;)
I find that the DSLR images can be enlarged to quite big prints with some careful interpolation upsizing. I do mine in 10% increments every time, untill I have the desired size (two Bicubic Smooth passes and one Bicubic Sharp pass in PS CS).

[tim]

I was advised by the printer not to do upsizing myself, that they could probably do a better job. The printer i'm using is Fuji Imagelabs. Hope they do a decent job... they're charging pretty well for it - about US$100! mpix.com and similar places don't seem to ship internationally, even if they did there's too much chance of damage, plus the shipping costs would be huge.

[Olegis]

US$100 ?! It seems VERY expensive to me, my lab printed that 50x70cm for about US$22. Or does it include matting and framing too ? At these sizes the frame and especially the glass in it can be pretty expensive. Where I live, for US$100 I can get 120x80cm print on canvas and that would include a wood frame.

[tim]

Prices here are high as volume is low - that's always the way here. That doesn't include anything except printing the pic. A good frame will cost me around US$120, or what i'm doing is having it mounted on black board and laquered for about US$30.

NZ's not great for prices of some things, but it has its advantages :)

[Olegis]

Yep. At least you can go out and shoot those magnificent Lord of the Ring landscapes ... :cool:

[tim]

With a helecopter or strong legs and lots of time, yeah! Those places were generally pretty remote.

[alan sh]

The way I look at it is as follows:

If, on the screen, I zoom in to 100% view, then, I am looking at detail from about 24" away - and it looks great. Now, my screen is 1280 x 1024 on a (supposedly) 19" monitor. This is 14" across for 1280 pixels. A 20D has 3504 pixels. So, in theory, it will be fine to view the whole picture from 24" away at a size of 3504/1280*14 = 38.375 inches. Vertical is then 2/3 of that at 25.55 inches.

So, viewing it further away allows you to make it even bigger. But I think a 3ft x 2ft picture is good for most viewings !!!!!

Enjoy my ramblings

Alan

[MDJAK]

Thank you all for your replies. I'll feel more confident now in blowing up my pics to match the awesome output of the 4000.

[CyberDyneSystems]

I've only had opportunity to print as large as 13X19"

I've done this with 20D, and 10D files and allways felt I had pelnty of detail.. thus could certainly go larger.

[Huckaback Photo]

Hello all
I registered 10 mins ago, this is my first post on this forum after reading above info, this may be usefull to someone looking for high quality large prints. here in uk a company called
www.photobox.com can supply large 30" x 20" Laser Printed on proper photographic paper (not inkjet) 150 years life span @ £19.95 each and A2 about £15. each post to europe /rest of world. £3.50 / £5.00. and much cheaper the more you order. I use D60 & 1D mk2 recently i cropped a D60 image and compressed the file size then uploaded to there site on a thursday evening saturday morning i had back a stunning 30" by 20" print in a sealed tube rolled in tissue for protection. theres a quallity device on there site which advises if the file is not sufficiently big enough. i think min no pixels on long side of image should be 1500 or more preferably .
Hope this is usefull,
Huckaback Photo

[Huckaback Photo]

Sorry mistake in my above post.must have been my first post nerves or something !!
Should have read
www.photobox.co.uk

[OviV]

MPIX.COM printed a 20"x30" for me that looked great. I did the upsizing myself in PS CS. I tried it in 10% increments first and then in one fell swoop and could not see a difference. I upsized it to 20x30 300 DPI and uploaded it as a JPG. The results were really impressive. So much so that the client (family portrait) is doing another shoot with me next week for 2 such enlargements. One thing to keep in mind is to avoid cropping as much as possible by framing the shot properly from the beginning. My shot was with my 20D. I also noticed that the Printed Size option of the PS CS zoom tool was a much better representation of what the printed image looked like than Actual Pixel.

Ovi

[donlavange]

Hello all
I registered 10 mins ago, this is my first post on this forum after reading above info, this may be usefull to someone looking for high quality large prints. here in uk a company called
www.photobox.com

Welcome Huckaback

[tim]

Ovi, could you tell me a little about the printed size tool? I've never heard of that before.

[Mark Kemp]

How big can you go depends, as others have said, on viewing distance, and also on what you find acceptable personally. A lot of people use either 200 pixels to the inch or 300 pixels to the inch as a rule of thumb for reasonable quality. Personally I used a D30 (3.2mp) for about 3 years. I regularly exhibited these at A3 ( less than 200ppi) and nobody ever commented on the lack of pixels. Many people suggested a lack of talent, but that's a different problem!. I now have a 20D and the detail in the images is higher but it doesn't jump out at you from a few feet away, you have to be looking at the print to deliberately assess the quality to really see it. I doubt if most people would know or care if you pushed your luck and stretched an image a bit more than usual, especially if it was an interesting image anyway. Good quality is a good thing, but if the image is powerful enough nobody will notice and if the image is dull, who cares about the quality, nobody will want to look at it anyway!

[snapsniper]

I think too that it depends on the content to a great extent: I have blown up a 2.2 mp portrait from an older digital to 8x10 and it looked wonderful. I have also blown up a 5 mp landscape scenery shot to the same size and it looked like ka-ka. (To my eyes, anyway.)

[OviV]

Tim, If you have the Zoom tool selected and you right click on your image you will get a few options, amongst these is Fit to screen, Actual Pixel, and Printed Size. If your image is already resized to whatever size you are going to print and you select printed size, PS will give you a fairly good representation on your monitor of the actual printed size.

Ovi

[tim]

Tim, If you have the Zoom tool selected and you right click on your image you will get a few options, amongst these is Fit to screen, Actual Pixel, and Printed Size. If your image is already resized to whatever size you are going to print and you select printed size, PS will give you a fairly good representation on your monitor of the actual printed size.

Ovi

Thanks Ovi. I wonder how it knows what size your screen is?

[Pyromaniac]

First off nice shots Olegis and Tim. Second other than mpix.com listed OviV any one know of some good labs in the U.S. to get prints done at? I know I could just Google search it but I figure that getting it from the forum I'll get labs that people have had a good experience and good results with. Or is there a trhead on that that I may have overlooked?

[Headcase650]

when Im upsizing for 16x20 or larger, I use PS CS, I crop to the right size say 16x20 but leave the DPI in the crop bar blank so it doesnt resample. Then go under image size and change your dpi to 300 and choose bicubic smoother, this prevents getting jagged lines or loosing much detail or sharpness. Now if your downsizing choose bicubic sharper. I picked this up from one of scott kelbys book. I have made some awsome 20x24's from a 300D that even with your nose on the print they looked outstanding

[mtndew]

Before i bought my 10D I had a picture of Science World Dome in Vancouver taken with my Canon G2. During a class i had it blown up to a 30x20 300dpi. It now hangs at my work and get so many comments on it. Just need to find a better frame for it

[mvonditter]

Try this guys. Change the file to a tiff, or better yet to a png. If the original shot was good, let’s say at ISO 100 or less RAW, and you switch to a png format at 280+ dpi, you can go to 96”X144” quite easily. Yes that’s right, 8X12 feet. I have taken shoots of Seattle for banners this way. Anything closer than 3 feet and you can see some pixelation, but that’s not what banners are for. :-) Taken with a 1Ds.

[OviV]

Tim, it does not need to know how big your monitor is but rather how many dots per inch. This information is available to the application from the operating system.

Ovi

[Huckaback Photo]

Having read through the various posts above I think all digital workers should stop and give some serious thought to the very important remark by OVI
"one thing to keep in mind is to avoid cropping as much as possible"
Now lets go back to medium format cameras for a moment, what the large negatives gave us (shall we say serious print workers ) was the abillity to crop very small sections and yet still have good quallity. and if you ever had the chance to see large format 10 inch x 8inch negs or trannys
they were usually mind blowing after 35mm. So medium format made the photographer think at the taking stage about how to best compose the picture because so few shots per film ( say 6 x 6 on 120 gave only 12 shots).
Now back to our beloved digital canon cameras, wouldn't it be nice if we all used the top end 16.5 mb 1Ds mk 2 with huge file sizes. go out take all pics with 50mm lens and crop the bit we actually need with the software ?? will this file then give us what we really need i think not (ie 30" x 20" high qual prints) so change the focal length to get best pos framing /crop of subject, camera on tripod if your really going for it, test shoot it, check exposure, bracket if needed etc.etc.
now with this file we don't crop it at all, so were not throwing away any pixels & in theory our 6.3mp 300d image files could produce better poster sized prints than a 16.5mp 1 ds mk 2 file drastically cropped say 50% - 75% or more its a lot of file info to lose.
One other point re resize images if you do not allready have a copy treat yourself imediately to
The Photoshop book for digital Photographers By Scott Kelby. and check out chapter 2 page 68,
turning small photos into poster sized prints.
my advice get a big print done to know what your camera is capable of unwrapping my first 30 x20 was an experiance i shall not forget.
Cheers
Martin (Huckaback Photo)
p.s. "A good big un will allways beat a good little one"

[Charlie G]

I know this has been asked before but I’m a new poster and wanted to get as much “expert” advice from as many of you as I can before making a decision.


I’ve only shot 35mm, and have for many years, mainly shooting landscapes, which I enlarge. My dream was to someday jump into a Medium Format camera system but I’ve been reading a lot about the new Canon 20D. With the Canon 20D, will enlargements of my landscape shots be pleasing to me, or will they look funny unless I’m far away from it? (I’m pretty picky about the quality of my shots but worry about the digital vs film thing).


I’ve read on this forum that some have had success with 20X30 enlargements using the 20D. How do they compare to a Medium Format 20X30 enlargement? Would I be making a bad decision by purchasing a Medium Format camera now in this new digital age?

Thanks for any advice you can give me. I really appreciate it!

[tim]

Tim, it does not need to know how big your monitor is but rather how many dots per inch. This information is available to the application from the operating system.

Ovi

Good point! :)

[Huckaback Photo]

Charlie
I used a pair of medium format Bronica ETR s cameras for years, the second body as a back up when shooting weddings for a local studio, complete with metz, quantum bat pack etc, the weight was considerable, but the quallity was great.
the last 5 years iv'e been totally digital, its been quite a learning curve gathering info from all means possible including forums like this one.
if you allready own canon slr with AF lenses your half way there, and would make sense to make the move there is so much good kit about,
however its never been a better time to buy medium format, shops in our area are stacked out with it at reasonable prices mainly due to many pro's & serious amateurs changing over to dig.
last year i held my first totally digital one man exibition with some 70 A3 prints on show, the feed back was great and 500 people in 3 days. I would not be using this gear if i thought the quallity was no good.
buy the best body you can afford in the first instance, bear in mind how much you will save on film.
Finally find someone local to you or visit an exhibition to see the printed image
Regards
Martin (Huckaback Photo)

[Charlie G]

Martin,

Thanks very much for taking the time to respond. I know I'll have a lot to learn with all of this but this forum looks like it'll be a big help.

Thanks again,

Charlie

[Huckaback Photo]

Hello Don Lavange

Many thanks for your welcome to this forum message above

Martin (Huckaback Photo)

[Adam Hicks]

What I've found that I'm REALLY happy with is printing 13x19 photo paper pro prints on my i9900... the thing is accurate up to about microscopic level :) The frame shops now sell 18x24 frames in all sorts ($20-$50) that work perfectly with a 2.5" matte around the image. It's perfect for 13x19's and makes for a nice even matte all the way around. It's pretty big when it's framed, and perfect for mantles, hallways, etc. I don't know what I'd do with anything larger, so I haven't printed anything larger! :) And I'm figuring about $4.50 a print at 13x19 is cheap - that's paper and ink.

Adam

[tim]

I just got my print back. I took this photo (http://www.mrwild.co.nz/PhotoGallery/2004/NewYears/slides/CRW_4701.html) with a 300D (exif info there) in RAW mode. I did very little post processing, just basic sharpening, and had it printed at 80cm x 53cm (32 x 21 inches) - 100dpi. The print's amazing, vivid colors and great quality. At less than 1 meter you can see that it's a little lacking in detail, but with a print this big you really need to stand further back than 1m. There are no pixels, and all the curves are nicely rounded. At > 1m it's just amazing.

I'll be getting more of these done for sure

[Huckaback Photo]

Tim

I did look at your picture looks good on screen must be impressive at 32 x 21, and important to note these big prints do not require high DPI.
Cheers
Martin (Huckaback Photo)

[Ajay213]

I’ve only shot 35mm, and have for many years, mainly shooting landscapes, which I enlarge. My dream was to someday jump into a Medium Format camera system but I’ve been reading a lot about the new Canon 20D. With the Canon 20D, will enlargements of my landscape shots be pleasing to me, or will they look funny unless I’m far away from it? (I’m pretty picky about the quality of my shots but worry about the digital vs film thing).

I’ve read on this forum that some have had success with 20X30 enlargements using the 20D. How do they compare to a Medium Format 20X30 enlargement? Would I be making a bad decision by purchasing a Medium Format camera now in this new digital age?

Are you happy with enlarged 35mm shots? If so, then you'll almost certainly be happy with something like the 20D and what it is capable of.

As to a 20D vs MF and blow up comparison, shot for shot I'm going to always put my money on the MF being better quality. The question though is if the 20D will blow up "good" enough.

My advice is to find a shot you like, see if you can get the full version of the file, load it up, blow it up then crop out a 4x6 shot and see how you like the quality, or even take it and get a full size image printed up and see what you think. I'm sure out of the thousands upon thousands of images posted here on these forums you can find one that you could use as a sample.

Andrew

[Huckaback Photo]

Andrew unless you take a higher quallity andd file size off someones website or from someone who does not object to there images being taken and used in this way, I think others may agree with me about possible copyright issues.
whilst i dont have a problem with anyone viewing or even a small print for own personal use.
to take an image off here and get it profesionally printed at a lab is a different matter.
note : a company I use ( www.photobox.co.uk) for printing have statement on there ordering part of the site saying that any files they print from should be the copyright of the person ordering the prints.
OTHER COMENTS ON THIS WOULD BE APPRECIATED>
Martin (huckaback Photo)

[Ajay213]

Andrew unless you take a higher quallity andd file size off someones website or from someone who does not object to there images being taken and used in this way, I think others may agree with me about possible copyright issues.

whilst i dont have a problem with anyone viewing or even a small print for own personal use.
to take an image off here and get it profesionally printed at a lab is a different matter.
note : a company I use ( www.photobox.co.uk) for printing have statement on there ordering part of the site saying that any files they print from should be the copyright of the person ordering the prints.
OTHER COMENTS ON THIS WOULD BE APPRECIATED>
Martin (huckaback Photo)

I agree 100%, and I see I really wasn't very clear in my original message, but I would never recomend that somebody just grab an image and print one off without asking for permission first (I kind of assumed that part of it and lumped it in the "see if you can get the full version of the file" part of my sentance).

I'm sure somebody on these forums will have an image that Charlie could print up for his own personal use just to "test" the image quality (ie personal use), or maybe not.

Andrew

[Huckaback Photo]

Thanks Andrew
Good to here that reply, I think its all to easy these days to use other photographers images from around the world and not just for our own use. Recently talking with another photographer whose friend had showed him one of his own images used as a front cover of a book on photography, Eastern European publication i think it was.
Now if you would like to see some top quality fles that would easily print to huge image size check out the Canon Japan site as they used to have some sample images there from most top digital SLR bodies.
Cheers Martin (Huckaback Photo)

[Akreager]

It really depends on your standards. Some would take a file and say 8x10 and others would take the exact same file and 20X30 - Who is right!=?

This is what I will say. I have a Nikon D70 and a 1D MarkII. Both coupled to great glass. If I have done everything right I am usually happy up to 11x16.5 max. If I want bigger I use Pixel Smart by Extensis (Genuine fractiles also works). I have taken small crops from photos, run them thru Pixel Smart and printed at what would have been 22X33.

You really do not need the 1Ds MKII if all you want is a big print now and again!

[Akreager]

It really depends on your standards. Some would take a file and say 8x10 and others would take the exact same file and 20X30 - Who is right!=?



This is what I will say. I have a Nikon D70 and a 1D MarkII. Both coupled to great glass. If I have done everything right I am usually happy up to 11x16.5 max. If I want bigger I use Pixel Smart by Extensis (Genuine fractiles also works). I have taken small crops from photos, run them thru Pixel Smart and printed at what would have been 22X33.



You really do not need the 1Ds MKII if all you want is a big print now and again!

[tim]

I did an 80*53cm (31 * 20 inch) print from a RAW photo taken with a rebel, and i'm very happy with the result. If you inspect the picture from very close you can see the flaws, but if you take one step back it looks perfect. I left upsizing and most of the sharpening to the printers.

[NGrinerPhoto]

i'm looking at a 24"x36" print i shot with a d60 right now ... large jpg