Quote:
Originally Posted by GeeTwo
If you think people are going to walk up to the banner and read it at normal book distance, you'll need about 2000 dpi for photo quality, or 600dpi for a good (not photo) quality. If you're posting it on the back wall and no one will be looking at it from less than ten feet away, you can probably get away with 200dpi or even 100dpi. To answer this question, try creating a small patch (8"x10" or less) of what is likely to be the most critical piece of your banner, and print it at various resolutions, then look at it from your "nearest" distance
|
If you make your document 2000dpi most large format printers (like a school would have) won't be able to print that, my classroom labs large format printer can print up to 1000dpi, but a file of that resolution will be a huge drain on storage space. The last banner I printed was for the rookie team that we mentored last year and it was 2'x6' @ 200dpi. It took around five minutes to print, but almost twenty for the printer to prepare the document because it was almost a half gigabyte in size. I just did a quick test to see, and a 9'x3' document at 600dpi would be 5.2 GB!
For a banner you will never need to be right next to it to read it. I print ours at 150-200dpi. A safe comparison is billboards, our local company gave a presentation in my class and the typical resolution they print at is between 18-40dpi because the subject is at a minimum of 100' away from the image. The further away your audience is the lower your quality can be.
For any kind of sign making, vector artwork is your friend. Your logo should be vector because you can scale it to any size without losing quality.
I never thought to ask, but why do you want to measure in pixels anyway?