Originally posted by: Soccerman06
I work mostly with 30x50" images with up to 500ppi posters for various companies. Now the work I have planned is more for fun and portfolio work, possibly displaying in shows if I feel they are up to quality. Honestly when I use my the 6mp camera, I have trouble separating clear pixel contrast, having to resort to a pathing tool to extract is such a pain.
My dads old EoS 10 just doesn't do enough. Now when I work with the 22mp Canons at work... that is like heaven for someone like me. I did a recent project at home using my fathers camera and it just doesn't look right, pixelation even at 11x17 at 150ppi, it looked horrible but when shrunk down to about 5x8 it worked fine, just too small.
...
Hope that helps
A few comments on that from someone who's been printing for 20 years, large format for half of that time.
Magazine ads don't require 150 dpi - industry standard on anything but rags is 300 dpi. The first image you linked was from an artist that draws everything as vector - there's no raster in the source for that. I'm a huge fan of his, btw
The second image you linked, the car ad, is backlit and as such is almost certainly printed by a
lightjet, which has resolution requirements in the 200 ppi range. There are films for inkjets that can work for that, but they don't hold up well in installations like that.
500 ppi implies you're printing offset at 250 line screen and you're going off the old rule of thumb that you need 2x the line screen for quality print.
That rule breaks down somewhere around the 150-175 line mark. Diminishing returns on image quality is exponential - the jump from 200-300 ppi on 200+ line work will mostly get you a sharper, crisper image. Up to 400 really will refine something that's already nice. 500 ppi at final size is generally overkill (unless the numbers get an "ooooh" from your client - and then, really, all bets are off).
In addition, viewing distance is paramount. A 30x50" image isn't generally going to be scrutinized at a viewing distance of 4", meaning you can relax a little more on the input. 200 ppi is generally just fine for a viewing distance of 18". Billboards, designed for reading from the highway, are typically printed with resolutions in the 8-30 ppi range (the files are often still quite large - 30 ppi over 40 feet is still a lot of pixels
). Read
here for more musing on the topic. I didn't read the whole page, but read over what he had to say about pixels versus the eye and generally agree with at least that part of the page.
What does this all mean? Well, if you're not exaggerating (perhaps unintentionally) your needs as I suspect, maybe you shouldn't be shooting digital, but medium format film/tx, then processing and scanning that film. I can sure tell you the guys that shot those cars did it on more than a $500 budget. In any event, no digital camera in a your price range is going to be able to deliver more than a small portion of an image like you describe. jpeyton lined out pretty clearly what your (digital) options were with your budget - if you need higher resolution, you need to expect to pay for that equipment.
Maybe rentals would be the way to go until you get a few jobs through the door? Maybe partner with a local photography studio? Or just buy what you can afford and make due until you do well enough that your business warrants spending more.
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