Friday, April 30, 2010

Gigapixel Printers


Work was reasonably interesting today. Reading up on the specs for the poster printer we use, I saw that it can print at 2400x1200 DPI (dots per inch). Considering that it can print posters up to 24x72", that equates to 1728 square inches. Thus, the printer can print up to 4,976,640,000 (almost 5 billion) dots on a piece of paper. Putting it in terms of digital cameras, that's like a 5,000 megapixel photograph (most digitals cameras don't exceed 12 megapixels).

As you know, my job is to stress test the photo kiosk. We try to make it break. So, I think I'm going to shoot a 500 image panorama, stitch the separate images in Photoshop, then try and print the result on that printer. It will be interesting to see how detailed the final image actually is. If the result is good, I'll probably buy the poster and frame it for one of the many blank walls in my apartment.

The weekend is finally here, which is great, but I'm probably going to spend it studying. I've got finals next Tuesday, and I need to score at least a 90% to avoid needing a retake of classes in the fall. For this reason, I'll cut this entry short and get some sleep.

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