Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2002/01/30
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Ladies and Gentlemen: I've been primarily a lurker on the LUG for a couple of years and there are so many knowledgeable people here, I thought this might be an appropriate place to ask these questions. Ted recently asked a question about dpi for images to be posted on the net. I've got a rather more involved and complex group of questions. My family owns a small company. About 15 years ago, we paid big bucks to produce a very nice brochure. It was our first ever brochure after being in business for 25 years. We received many complements on it and the photos in it were really nicely done. Trouble was, in order to get the $/brochure cost to something reasonable, we wound up buying 2500 of them. At the time, we had no idea that it would take us 15 years to give them out. Obviously, alot of things change in 15 years so it doesn't take long for the brochures to become outdated. My picture was in the brochure and 15 years ago, my beard was black and not white like it is now. So, it's easy for people who got the brochure recently who saw me to know that it wasn't fresh off the presses. It seems that in this digital day and age, there ought to be a way to produce a smaller number of high quality brochures that can be easily kept current using a desktop publishing package and a color laser printer. We have several Tektronix color laser printers around our plant. I've seen sample photographs output from them that are almost impossible to tell from real pictures. One of my questions is this. Is it possible using Leica glass and Tektronix color printers to produce a brochure that would come close to something done professionally using a 4 color printing press? My feeling is that it is but what have others found? I know the quality from both processes will not be the same but can we get close enough that I can get something that isn't trash so that I can give it to prospective customers? There are many corollary questions to this one. I know from fooling around that the resolution of those photographs when scanned needs to be in proportion to the size that they are going to be printed and the resolution of the printing device. The Tektronix printers can output at 600 or 1200 dpi. At what resolution should I scan my Leica negatives or transparencies if we're going to output at say 4 times the size of the negative if I print at 600dpi or 1200dpi? Should I scan at 2700 dpi using my Nikon LS-2000 or should I pick some other resolution? Do I need to buy a 4000 dpi scanner if I want to go to 11 x 17 with those same negatives or transparencies? Are there any rules of thumb that relate image size and printer resolution to scanner dpi. Or, should we scan at max dpi and sample down in photoshop? And, finally, I've tried outputting some scanned transparencies to paper using Photoshop and the colors have been less than brilliant. The samples of photographs we can get from Tektronix from those printers is truly brilliant, how do I duplicate that brilliance? Sorry for the long post and thanks for the help. Ernie - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html