Comment on Canvas sizes - inches and dpi and pixels by Qinni
Our local printing company has some machines (they call it "solvent" and I forgot how they called the other one) that can take up to 1400dpi. Recommended is 700dpi minimum. It prints roughly 12meters of print per hour, sized 1.6m x 4m maximum. Ain't that a beast x)
how much does it cost to print something? those bigger machinese I found tend to cost a lot more, so I never print there xD.
Print of roughly 60 square centimeters costs me around 30PLN (almost 10$). Paper is half-matte half-glossy, 300g/m2 professional paper - better quality than most gicless I came across, though it could be thicker a bit.
Printing 8 works on maximum dimensions (32x46cm) would cost me 22PLN (7.20$).
And... yeah, you really have to look for a company. At first I went to a photo printing company, but they kept messing with balance/contrast/lightness and all prints they made went out horrible. They told me they print out only jpgs. No tiff, no psd x) He didn't inform me of any margins I should keep, and truncated them as he pleased... etc.
So I changed the company. The other guy in new one not only showed me the machines he prints on and papers they accept, but explained what format should I use (tiff with lzw non-lossy compression), which color profile and color settings (turns out the best is RGB with no color management profile), what margins should I keep... he even printed out test prints for free (these 8 works I wrote earlier in this comment about - I asked about estimate cost). And now he's printing out reference color swatches for me and few other clients, so we can calibrate our monitors properly (so what we print matches what we see on monitors). They even have machine that cuts out any format you want, so no more squeezing several bookmarks to fit one sheet.
So... maybe you should look for another company x)
Printing 8 works on maximum dimensions (32x46cm) would cost me 22PLN (7.20$).
And... yeah, you really have to look for a company. At first I went to a photo printing company, but they kept messing with balance/contrast/lightness and all prints they made went out horrible. They told me they print out only jpgs. No tiff, no psd x) He didn't inform me of any margins I should keep, and truncated them as he pleased... etc.
So I changed the company. The other guy in new one not only showed me the machines he prints on and papers they accept, but explained what format should I use (tiff with lzw non-lossy compression), which color profile and color settings (turns out the best is RGB with no color management profile), what margins should I keep... he even printed out test prints for free (these 8 works I wrote earlier in this comment about - I asked about estimate cost). And now he's printing out reference color swatches for me and few other clients, so we can calibrate our monitors properly (so what we print matches what we see on monitors). They even have machine that cuts out any format you want, so no more squeezing several bookmarks to fit one sheet.
So... maybe you should look for another company x)
I dunno, I kindda like mine though, cause i think it's good enough for convention prints and a 12 x 18inch print costs about 80cents on cardstock paper, matted finish; the quality's actually pretty good too; i don't think having a higher resolution's going to make a difference since I don't draw that detailed anyways, and everyone likes my prints :3~ (i paid off all my college debt with my convention income, so I think they like my prints...?)
If it works for you, then it's good too :]
:3. if I ever do high-quality fine-art prints or a more professional book, I'll probably look into a better printing company though 