As I wrote in my previous post, I’ve just starting to explore how large prints I can make with the 3800. I printed the one below to 41×72cm (16×28 inches), which went fairly well. Not much hassle with that.

My plan with this picture was to mount it on foamboard, give it an overmat and hang it on my office wall. Nothing fancy, just something to look at when I raise my head from the screen. So I planned to mat it out to 60×90cm (23×35 inch). This is not a standard frame size, but it doesn’t matter because I don’t intend to frame it anyway, just hang the sandwich directly on the wall. After all, it’s just an experiment with office decoration as bonus.

Man was it hard to handle print this large. First of all, cutting the window mat was surprisingly much harder than when it is a bit smaller. Then comes the mounting. All I did was familiar stuff, but everything was 4 times as difficult when the size was doubled. I can’t imagine how some of you guys manage to mat and frame even bigger prints from the 24 inch or 44 inch printers. Certainly not for me.

The matted print was very big, and I can’t really see when I would need something bigger. I mean, you need a wall big enough too. Except for a really shitty overmat, and some waves in the print, it turned out pretty nice. I think I will enjoy it at my office.

One interesting thing about this one, which also was part of my experiment, is the resolution of the original. I shot this two years ago with my 20D (that I later replaced). I cropped the image slightly at the top and bottom, and ended up with an image file of less than 7 Mp. This shouldn’t even be enough to print A3, but due to the large smooth areas, and very low contrast details, it printed beautiful at this big size. If there had been much high contrast details like branches and leaves, it wouldn’t have worked, but his one did. It just proves how much the subject matters when it comes to uprezzing, and how we perceive sharpness and detail.