Sensor size?

[michaelnotar]

personally i havent had good luck with geniune factals, or the 10% technique in PS. it gets pixelated in an odd way i cant describe it u just have to try it. for enlargements of 16x20 + i print at 200 dpi, if i have to upsize, i resize it and upsample to only 200 dpi.

while lowest iso might seem like the best option, iso 400 will give a slight grit and appear a little more sharper/acutance (edge sharpness). i recall looking at 11x14 b/w darkroom prints for 4x5 iso 100 film and iso 400, the 400 jumped off the page.

i went through all this junk u are a few years ago, i actually ended up selling a 16MP Slr for an 8 MP one for normal shoots and shooting 4x5 and drum scanning it to any size you want for large prints. drum scans are exceptionally nice.

[maddy]

I've also tried genuine fractals and the 10% technique and found neither to my liking. I've got a medium format and have scanned the negs. Would like to be able to do it all with digital though. The lenses I will get are 35mm.

[michaelnotar]

the only option of those parameters would be the canon 1ds mark 3 at 22MP FF or perhaps the mark 2 at 16mp for half. the m3 is like 48k tho.

[maddy]

So, the higher pixel count matters if even with a smaller 1.6 sensor?

[Noel_Carboni]

An option for those of you who like tons of detail, depending on your subject material, is to take a bunch of images and stitch them together. This works wonders for landscapes and overcomes all kinds of limitations. And now it's practically painless with Photoshop CS3 and CS4.

Here's a sample of one I did that way. This is 10,000 x 1474 pixels and is half the size of my master file in each dimension. Click the image to see the downsized high res image.


Here's another of quite different subject material:


-Noel

[Noel_Carboni]

By the way, used with care Genuine Fractals can yield amazing results. I have a 24x30 of a church in Colorado (St. Malo) done from a single D30 frame (that's a 3 MP camera with the end cropped off) that stands up to being looked at quite closely.

-Noel

[David_Buzzard]

As a rule, the bigger the sensor, the better. You have a thing called pixel density, which basically means that the denser the pixels are, the more digital 'noise' you're going to have. That's why you have better resolving power in a full frame Nikon D3 than a 1.5x Nikon D2x, even though the D2x has slightly more pixels.

The other thing to keep in mind is that the larger your print size, the less your pixels per inch (DPI) ratio has to be. So, rather than extrapolating the file size up when you make a large print, decrease the DPI. So for your 34x40 inch print, try it at 100 DPI, rather than 300 DPI. You still might need to extrapolate a bit, but the less you do, the better off you'll be. I've made 24x36 inch prints from my D2x, and there's been no significant noise, pixelation, or loss of detail.

If you're staying with the Nikon system, definitely look to the D700 or D3, or maybe the new product that's coming out next week. The Canon 5D or 1Ds would work well also. The quality of the lenses is going to have a direct influence on the image quality, especially when you start getting into really big prints.

If you have $20 or $30K spend, try one the medium format Hasselblad systems.

David Buzzard