Min Resolution for 40x60 printing?

[matthiasr]

I am quite new in the Forum and interrest in Printing some of my Photographs. I allready got the Wallmount etc ready only the Printing needs to be done. Therefore I got two questions:

What is the required resolution for 40x60?
Where to print them to get a great Quality print?
Mostlikely I will Print some of these Landscapes or some of the Car Imagery from my front page. I got most of them Shot with a 24MP Cam or later on with a 42MP. Someone Told me that he used a 100MP for his 2m x 2m Wall picture. Therefore 24MP should be quite enough for this scale isn´t it?

Thanks.

Matthias Ramahi

 

[Shashin]

Yes, 24MP is fine for 40" x 60" prints. I have also printed 35mm negative at 60". Or are you talking about 40cm by 60cm? I would not worry about resolution for such small prints.

Hopefully, others can point to a printer for you. I always printed myself. However, most good printers will be fine.

 

[matthiasr]

Or are you talking about 40cm by 60cm

Yes I mean 40cm x 60cm.

 

[Rand47]

Who is doing the printing? What kind of prints? If we’re talking about archival pigment ink jet prints, each printer has a “native resolution” for the printhead. You should size the file (Gigapixel AI is excellent for this) accordingly.

Rand

 

[Geoff]

Old ways we used to figure this:
conservatively: 300 dpi (dots per inch) x 24" (60cm) = 7200 pixels on the long edge. That's the old standard. Some used 240dpi depending on the printer.
For a minimal amount: 180 dpi x 24" = 4320 pixels.

 

[paulraphael]

I've made several 40x60" prints from Nikon 36MP images. They look good. I've sold several, each for more than I paid for the camera. They don't look flawless. And these images were made with attention to detail that's more common with view cameras than small cameras. For example, the camera was mounted on a 12lb wood tripod; lenses were excellent (although not state-of-the-art by 2025 standards) all exposures were in live view (which locks up the mirror); I used a cable release; I spent minutes getting focus and aperture just right; etc.

I also spent a whole lot of time working on the files before printing, including fine-tuning the sharpening workflow, going over every pixel to look for aliasing artifacts (insanely tedious); and in most cases adding a bit of noise, to make up for the unnatural plasticky look of some low-detail areas—a problem with big prints from any low-noise modern camera.

By "not flawless" I mean that when you walk right up to them, they don't look like giant contact prints. You can see the image structure, and the illusion of infinite detail breaks down. People did ask me if they were printed from 8x10.

I could get what I consider a flawless print with that camera at sizes up to 36" or 38" wide. This translates to around 200ppi at the print, which goes against my more scientific side-by-side evaluations (which are more stringent). But with nothing next to it to compare to, a 36" print from this camera is capable of looking good enough that no one would complain.

I'm using a Fuji 100 megapixel camera now. I haven't printed big with it yet. Likely it could meet the above standards of "flawless" at 50" to 60" wide.

 

[dougpeterson]

A huge consideration here is subject matter. If viewers notice resolution at all it's because they know to expect some visual detail that is missing or looks "wonky". Unfortunately for you landscape and cars are two areas where viewers will inherently understand what detail to expect and therefore will be impacted by whether its there or not... the fine lines on headlights, the grain in leather, the texture of a tree trunk in the distance, the fine edges of leaves.

Examples at the other end of the spectrum could include a picture of clouds passing overhead, a pan-blur shot of a child running through a field, a still-life of a bowling bowl, or an abstract out of focus image of Christmas lights. In these cases literally a 2 megapixel image could print to 60cm and hold up to scrutiny.

Most subjects/photos lie on the spectrum between those two extremes.

 

[Paul Spinnler]

Important also to blur / grain the underlying image if you do high digital magnifications to take the digital structure element out, IMHO, ie it looks better sometimes to not oversharpen and add a bit of grain in LR or C1