Digital BW, The Print

> I too have a 1Ds and have printed 24x36 prints on my Epson 9500 from 
> its files.  The prints look fine at normal viewing distances, but I 
> believe that is the limit for this camera.  With close viewing of this 
> size print, one can see the pixels making the image.  I never wanted 
> to print anything bigger the 24x36 because I don't think the files 
> would print well.
>
> I did print a 32x48 from a 5D file once.  The image suffered from the 
> unsharpness of the lens.  I don't think very highly of Canon's 
> lenses.  I have printed 44x44 inch prints from my Hasselblad with 
> PhaseOne H20 back, and the 48mb file looked great.  I don't think the 
> size of the file matters as much as the quality of it.
>
> Ben

We have lot's of big prints in our studio's entrance from 1ds cameras, 
including some 4 feet wide, or more.  The key is to have  images that 
still looks good without a lot of detail, which applies to a surprising 
number of images.  This means no west coast style bw images that depend 
heavily on detail and crisp tonality. Ours are all color. I doubt bw 
would enlarge as well. As others have said, sins of omission, e.g. loss 
of detail, are less egregious than sins of commission, e.g. adding 
artifacts. Our post-production guys use Photoshop to resize, and they do 
so in 10% increments.  Whatever you do, though, make sure to make some 
test prints.  They can be small sections of a file to save paper and 
ink, and definitely compare any technique to simply resizing the image 
without interpolation, and hence sending quite a low res file to the 
printer.

In a recent post, I talked about an Inca printer, which makes 5 x 10 
foot prints in 20 seconds.  To print without interpolation on this 
printer, the file should be at 100 dpi at output size.  That's a much 
lower resolution than normal. (My normal file resolution for inkjet 
printing is 360 dpi to 720 dpi at output size.) Certainly, these prints 
look a bit soft close up, but if you stand back a few feet, they look 
quite good.

Regarding Canon lenses, many L lenses are very good, such as the 100 
macro, 70-200 F4...but the wide zooms tend to be rather poor, with the 
edges of the pictures being much softer than the center to a degree 
noticeable even in small prints.

-Peter