How Big Can I Print This Photo?

October 13, 2006 @ 11:01PM

How Big Can I Print This Photo?

By Haje Jan Kamps

It’s a question that keeps haunting the digital camera world again and again – how big, exactly, can you print a photo taken with a X megapixel digital camera?

The answers seem to differ a lot, partially because of the various definitions. In a bid to put an end to all the half-arsed opinions and semi-valid arguments, Design 215 have taken one for the team, and explain it all… Nevermind that I don’t quite agree with them, but it’s worth having a read either way.

The maximum size you can print a photo at depends on three things: How much image data you have (i.e how many megapixels your camera has), how much you can upsample this data (i.e you can easily increase the size of a photo by 20% in Photoshop, and most people would never be able to tell the difference), and how close to the print your audience will be standing (if they will be close, it has to be high resolution (typically 300 dpi), if they will be further away, you can get away with printing it at lower resolution, which means your final print can be much bigger).

Check out the chart over at Design 215

(via photojojo)

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Comments

Anonymous

5 years ago

Thanks for mentioning my chart. Its really difficult to come up with the ultimate answer for this question. As I’ve tried to explain to everyone, the chart is a means of comparing megapixels to megapixels, given a constant of 300dpi (ppi really). Directly underneath the megapixels chart is a table showing how big you can make prints using 200ppi and 150ppi.