Maximum print size of 14mp?

Having not owned a printer, I'm curious what the largest effective size you could print with the 14 megapixels offered by the NEX series would be.

I take landscape photography. Also, I'm not opposed to upscaling techniques, as long as the final product doesn't look unnatural or ugly.

--
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

-Robert Frost

Did you use a tri-pod?

Was there any camera shake? (remote trigger or shutter timer is highly recommended for landscape)

How accurately was the image focused?

What glass is sitting in front of the sensor ( this might be most important in fact more of a limiting fact than the sensor itself ) the NEX sensor scores as high as the Leica M9 in total performance!

I would recommend a 24 x 36 as a great starting point for testing. Fine art printing is a whole different art than the "quicky-print" on the corner - here is some of what goes into doing it right:

With all those image capture factors being perfect and scrutinized I would print a test strip (only 2-4 inches of point-of-interest of the print) AFTER nozzle cleaning AND print head alignment. This is also a great time to do any final color adjustments.

If image is still "holding up" go up one size and do another test strip. Ink at this size costs $40-60 for a full size print so test strips are better to bin than full prints!

Hope that helps a little - fine art printing is so complicated but I picked up a few tips from my best friend who does it at a very high level.

Good Luck!

The Nex image size is 4592 x 3056 pixels. Printing at 300 dpi is ideal, 240 is generally quite acceptable, and sometimes you can get away with 200.
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But as the above poster commented, the lens can be as important if not more so than the sensor. I have prints in our boardroom that are 30 x 45" from my Pentax K20D with a Pentax DA*16-50mm f2.8 lens that look very nice! Shot on a tripod though.
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http://picasaweb.google.com/BlackCanoeDog

DGF said:

Having not owned a printer, I'm curious what the largest effective size you could print with the 14 megapixels offered by the NEX series would be.

I take landscape photography. Also, I'm not opposed to upscaling techniques, as long as the final product doesn't look unnatural or ugly.

Click to expand...

I have written some notes about this topic, which can be seen here:

http://www.robsphotography.co.nz/Determining-Print-Size-Of-Digital-Images.html

I often print at 150 pixels per inch (ppi) and get very satisfactory results. So, I would say that you could get a print size from the NEX cameras of about 30 inches x 20 inches at pretty good quality, depending on how good the image and the printer are!

This is based on an image size of 4592 pixels x 3056 pixels, which when divided by 150ppi, gives 30.6 inches x 20.4 inches. But, in the end, it often comes down to trial and error, and printing small cropped images first to determine how large you can go before you are dissatisfied with the print. Sometimes you might get a really good print at 100ppi, but with other images you might need to print at 200ppi, or higher, before you are satisfied!

Regards
Rob
http://www.robsphotography.co.nz/Sony-nex-A900.html
Analaysis of the pixel density advantage of NEX over the A900

If someone with a perfect visual acuity would stand in front of a large print, at a distance equal to the print diagonal, he wouldn't be able to discriminate more than about 15 millions pixels (trust me, I checked the maths).

However, the visual acuity needed for a 20/20 vision is lower, and 6 Mpix is all that's theoretically required.

If the viewer backed up as the print gets larger, you'd never need more pixels.

I know that in some cases, you may want to get a closer look at the print, in which case the resolution needs explode, but the message is, with technically perfect 6Mpix images and above, there is no real problem to enlarge as large as you want. I have a 50x75cm enlargement at home, printed from a slightly cropped Nikon D70 image (a 6Mp camera), and nobody ever told me it was unsharp. I even had to print a few copies for friends!

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Equipment in profile...

Sounds about right. I've printed a 10mp photo from my DSLR at 20"x30", and it has great detail. I did use a pretty good lens. There is some blockiness in the sky, but I think this is an artifact of it getting overly compressed at the photo site.

So, I think 14 mp should be more than enough, but I would strive for a good, clean source photo.

noegd said:

If someone with a perfect visual acuity would stand in front of a large print, at a distance equal to the print diagonal, he wouldn't be able to discriminate more than about 15 millions pixels (trust me, I checked the maths).

However, the visual acuity needed for a 20/20 vision is lower, and 6 Mpix is all that's theoretically required.

If the viewer backed up as the print gets larger, you'd never need more pixels.

Click to expand...

...

--
Gary W.

noegd said:

If someone with a perfect visual acuity would stand in front of a large print, at a distance equal to the print diagonal, he wouldn't be able to discriminate more than about 15 millions pixels (trust me, I checked the maths).

Click to expand...

I am interested in a mathematical calculation that supports this viewpoint, can you let us know what calculation you made?

noegd said:

However, the visual acuity needed for a 20/20 vision is lower, and 6 Mpix is all that's theoretically required.

If the viewer backed up as the print gets larger, you'd never need more pixels.

I know that in some cases, you may want to get a closer look at the print, in which case the resolution needs explode, but the message is, with technically perfect 6Mpix images and above, there is no real problem to enlarge as large as you want. I have a 50x75cm enlargement at home, printed from a slightly cropped Nikon D70 image (a 6Mp camera), and nobody ever told me it was unsharp. I even had to print a few copies for friends!

Click to expand...

It's also true, of course, that with a 24 mp camera, such as the Sony A900, you can get a satisfactory quality print width that is double the size that you can get from a 6mp camera, assuming that both are printed at the same pixels per inch.

And, with a 24mp camera, you have a great deal more capability to get a large print from just a small crop of an image as demonstrated in the images here:

http://www.robsphotography.co.nz/Sony-A900.html

Regards
Rob

Yes, basically correct. As the print gets larger, you really should be viewing from increasingly further distances, in which case any anomolies are difficult to see.

That said, I have made 20x30 inch prints from my R1 (10MP), and even up close it shows no image artifacts. Of course, I started with a raw file, processed it in photoshop and delivered a 16 bit TIFF to the print shop.

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The greatest of mankind's criminals are those who delude themselves into thinking they have done 'the right thing.'

• Rayna Butler