Poster Printing Recommendations, Kinko's, Staples, OfficeMax or other? Options

[briv1016]

I want to get a couple of 24x36 posters printed with the true and false color versions of the Calypso and Resolution panoramas. (Framed, and replaced with the latest full panorama as it becomes available on the Pancam website.) Kinko's was the first thing that came to mind when I started, but I'm not sure if they can deliver the "photo" quality I'm looking for.

What companies do you guys (and gals) recommend for this kind of job? I’m attaching downsampled JPEGs to give you guys an idea of what I had in mind. (Full images are 23112x15408 TIFFs)

Thanks for any help in advanced.

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[ElkGroveDan]

Costco. Hands down.

[hendric]

When I did the New Horizons poster, I went with this place

http://www.largeformatposters.com/Vinyl-Banners-Posters.html

Their printout of the poster was perfect, without any of the edges clipped. The full size poster looks precisely like the image file. When I went through normal photo places, they would always miss a fraction of the edges, a few mm usually.

[elakdawalla]

Costco. Hands down.

Really? I didn't even know they did printing!

Hmm. Looks like their maximum size is 20 by 30 inches. Pretty big but not quite as big as briv was looking for. But holy cow, only nine bucks for a 20 by 30 print! And six for a 16 by 20! And they do square prints, handy for planetary images -- 8 by 8 for $1.50, 12 by 12 for $3. Hmm hmm hmm......

I get a discounted price from my independently-owned print shop on the corner because the Society does so much volume with them, but even their lowest price is 10 bucks per square foot; cost me $50 for a 24 by 30 print of the "lunar world record" photo. Looks really nice though.

--Emily

[ElkGroveDan]

Ah the size. Forgot about that. But both quality and price are superior.

I spent a couple weeks redoing a middle school class photo that came from a scan of a 5x7 textured original print. And thanks to some of the image processing ideas I've learned around here with some of my own little tricks, I came up with the most amazing cleaned up image, but when I had them run it at Costco it nearly blew me away how forgiving their print process is. Of course once it was under glass in a stock 20x30 frame people thought I was some kind of wizard.

I will also add that vague "copyright" issues are given a much more serious look at Kinkos than some other places. I don't mean something so obvious as reprinting a Led Zeppelin poster, but for example I've gone in and colored 50 year old portraits and because they have that studio look Kinkos tends to balk and make you come up with sources and releases. So if you use Kinkos be sure and bring a copy of NASA/JPL's copyright statement.

[ElkGroveDan]

I want to get a couple of 24x36 posters printed with the true and false color versions of the Calypso and Resolution panoramas.

I should also add briv1016, that you might look at one of the Fast Fourier plug-ins that are available for Photoshop and see what it does with those dust-induced seams. You've got yours lined up pretty evenly spaced and I suspect it might recognize them.

If I remember I'll run it on your samples above tonight and see what I come up with.

[briv1016]

I should also add briv1016, that you might look at one of the Fast Fourier plug-ins that are available for Photoshop and see what it does with those dust-induced seams. You've got yours lined up pretty evenly spaced and I suspect it might recognize them.

These are straight off of the Pancam team's website. I just re-sized and layered the true and false images into one large image.

[briv1016]

Is 300dpi the highest practical resolution available for a 24x36 print? The full resolution of the two images are 642ppi when scaled down to 24x36, are there any places that can print a 24x36 image at that resolution?

Also, what is the relationship between dpi and ppi? Is it 1:1 or is it more complex than that?

[briv1016]

One last thing, the printing site is requiring a FTP for transferring large files. Can someone recommend a secure ftp?