Print Size

by Joseph T. Sinclair

I vis­it­ed a phone cam­era pho­to exhib­it at a small café in Napa, Cal­i­for­nia. It showed off five pho­tog­ra­phers all of whom were good, and I enjoyed the exhib­it which fea­tured about three dozen pho­tos. I was struck, how­ev­er, by the mes­sage that the exhib­it sent.

The largest pho­tos were 8″ x 8″. Most of the pho­tos were 4″ x 4″. I inter­pret­ed the exhib­it to be say­ing, you can­not expect to get large high-res­o­lu­tion prints out of a phone cam­era, so this exhib­it has to fea­ture small prints.

What a naïve mes­sage! A 10-megapix­el (MP) dig­i­tal cam­era is the equiv­a­lent of 35mm film. Pho­tog­ra­phers rou­tine­ly used 35mm film to pro­duce high-res­o­lu­tion prints that were as large as 30″ x 40″. The pho­tos in the exhib­it pre­sum­ably were tak­en dur­ing an era when phone cam­eras typ­i­cal­ly had 5 MPs or more. To think that you can’t make good prints big­ger than 8” x 8” with 5 MPs assumes a dis­tinct lack of post-pro­cess­ing skill.

I don’t know what the rea­son was for the small prints. Per­haps the pho­tos were tak­en at the dawn of phone cam­eras a few years before the exhib­it when the typ­i­cal phone cam­era had only 2 or 3 MPs. Today things are dif­fer­ent, how­ev­er. Many phone cam­eras have between 10 and 20 MPs, and some phone cam­era sev­er­al years old have between 8 and 12 MPs. Even with 5 MPs you can get a sharp print as large as 12” x 16” assum­ing you took a sharp pho­to and did some post-processing.

The point to be made is that there is no longer any small­ness to phone cam­era pho­tos. Phone cam­eras are per­fect­ly capa­ble of tak­ing pho­tos that can be made into large sharp prints.

You do need to keep in mind that most pho­tos require post pro­cess­ing and in par­tic­u­lar sharp­en­ing. You’re not like­ly to get many good prints from pho­tos that have not been processed. Then too, dif­fer­ent phone cam­eras have dif­fer­ent capa­bil­i­ties; that is, they pro­duce pho­tos of dif­fer­ent qual­i­ty. Although many phone cam­eras have astound­ing­ly high qual­i­ty today, some don’t. In addi­tion, cam­eras with small sen­sors, such as phone cam­eras, have dif­fi­cul­ty tak­ing sharp pic­tures in low light. Nonethe­less, phone cam­eras are seri­ous pho­to­graph­ic instru­ments today.

With the above in mind, go for it. Don’t be afraid to use your 8+ MP phone cam­era pho­tos to make large sharp prints. But before you make any prints of any size, learn to do some basic post pro­cess­ing, par­tic­u­lar­ly sharpening.