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Digital printing, awkward customer!
Hi all!
I am putting finishing touches to a job that’s due to be printed later this week. Substrate is matt-finish dibond digital and is being printed through a Gerber Solara Ion V.
The images we are being asked to print are of variable quality; one in particular is a jpeg of dimensions 1600×922 and in the final print will be ~1500mm x 900. Unless my maths is way out this will be a final resolution of ~25dpi. The sign will be viewed from 6-8′ by pedestrians but mostly drivers passing at a distance of 20-30′.
The customer seems oblivious to my concerns and I fully expect him to complain once print is finished if resolution isn’t great!
I am not getting much feedback from our supplier (who is generally quite good) about whether this will be an adequate resolution to print with or not and would be grateful for your thoughts.
We’re pretty new to digital printing and I was wondering whether there are any rules of thumb or guidance as to what would work and how this relates to the original artwork. I can work my way around formulae and am not scared by spreadsheets!
Very grateful for any feedback!
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4 Replies
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The general advice is to aim for a resolution no less than 75dpi at actual size so your print is likely to look quite pixellated. You could always try re-sampling the image at 75dpi. This will not add any detail into the image but will make it look less pixellated.
In a situation like this I usually test print a section at actual size. It sounds to me like you are outsourcing the printing so this may not be an option for you.
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Phill,
Many thanks for this.
It seems obvious to print a sample so that they can visualise the print and I can’t believe that didn’t occur to us before now – head fuzzy after a boozy weekend!
Rgds,
Simon
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well ppi/dpi comes into play when there is lots of changes in colours from dark to light, if it was a sky background it wouldn’t show up as much.
JPG compression is the nasty, that shows as blocksPhotoshop CS3 etc has some fantastic enlargement routines, Go Image Size and choose "Bicubic Smoother" and enlarge, this will smooth out those pixels. Sometimes the RIP’s dont do a good enough job.
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Dave,
Thanks for help; played around with re-sampling commands in Corel Paint and certainly seems to have smoothed out the image. However, resolution is the key and I am banking on my customer actually pulling his finger out and getting me the proper files.
Thanks again!
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