I have had 24 x36 inch prints made from images that were 1536 x
1024. When viewed from the PROPER perspective you can not tell it
is digital image. Up close yes, it is not pin sharp.
I have very good eyes for close-up viewing (if I peer over the top of the glasses I wear to see things that are more than six inches away). I'm often able to read tiny print that most people can't tell is there at all, such as the artists' signatures on some postage stamps. I find that if an average digital image is sent to the printer at an actual output resolution of 200-220 pixels per inch, I can see pixelization in many parts of it. If I back off to a comfortable viewing distance, a print with that resolution looks like a conventional photographic print to me, except that it isn't as sharp. But if a 2240 x 1680 pixel image is printed 36" wide, its actual printed resolution is only 62+ pixels per inch (much lower than any modern computer screen), and many people can see pixelization and/or softness when viewing it from, say, 1.5-2 feet away.
So how big a print you can satisfactorily make from the E-10's images depends entirely on a) how far away you want it to be viewed from, and b) how "intelligent" your software is about upsampling to manufacture more pixels out of the original information, allowing you to boost the actual output resolution enough so that the individual pixels in the print are too small for most people to see. Genuine Fractals may do a better job of that than Photoshop can. It sounds like that's the case, from the comments of GF users here, and of course that's exactly what GF claims to do. I'd love to try it out. It must somehow smooth out the residual "soft pixelization" wherein several new, smaller pixels still form a blurred outline of the original big pixel, as for example when you upsample an image 3x using Photoshop's Resize command. But if GF allows you to make huge prints from the E-10's images, that's a function of GF, not the E-10.
I still think 4 megapixels** is not quite as enlargeable as a 35mm film image. Pretty close, but not quite. If you find 16 x 20 prints from 35mm acceptable to your eye, but not 20 x 24s, then you probably won't find 16 x 20s from the E-10 equally acceptable...and so on.
That said, I LOVE my E-10, and the 8-1/2 x 11 and smaller prints I make are not only indistinguishable from conventional photo prints in the eyes of most viewers, but are often superior to them in my own eyes as far as color, contrast control, and shadow detail are concerned.
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By the way, can anyone explain to me why 2240 x 1680 = 3,763,200 pixels is refered to as 4 megapixels? Who's kidding whom?
