Quote Originally Posted by Greg Lockrey
I'd have to agree with Bill. I routinely make digital photgraphs of clients murals using a Canon 5D and using it on a Sinar P with a Schneider 90mm Super Angulon lens. Sometimes I make up to about 9 such "scans" and stitch them together in PS. I then make the prints on my Epson 9600 using Qimage for the print processing. With Qimage, pixals can be re interpolated up to 49 feet lengths! Yes, that's feet. They may not be exactly perfect to the original, but I will put money that if you put both images under glass and stand three feet away you couldn't tell which is which. This can be done very economicaly as well. As for e-mailing large files...how does sending 1 gb files sound? There are several free services that will do this. "You Send It" comes first to mind.

Greg, first, don't get me started with Qimage. It's pyramid interpolation is a disaster when it comes to artifacts and maintaining detail in an image. The Photoshop routine mentioned at the DIgital Outback photography site does a superior job. As does the SAR software package using Backprojected Jensen Xin Li.

And just because you can interpolate to 49 feet and have an 8 dpi image to print (yes, I'm still laughing here) doesn't mean you should. Maybe it's fine for a bulletin board viewed from a mile a way, but we are talking about art reproductions here. I shoot a little such work with the 1Ds and stitch multiple frames using panorama tools. This gets me per pixel stitching accuracy. I stitch four wide to give me an image 15000 pixels wide. Enough for a 300 dpi 50" print. A straight 1DS MK2 image of this would only be 99dpi. Anyone who is satisfied with that has a pretty low threshold for quality!

Anyone stating that 1Ds MK2 can do a sharp 6 foot print would also try to sell us on stating that a 6MP DSLR gives sharp 30" prints....which we know they can't.....as the rez would be the same! 30" prints from a 6mp DSLR look like Cr@p....as does a 6 foot print from the MK2.

Let's geck back to quality reproduction discussion like the Betterlight or 4x5 scanned film.