Calendar print

[Hening Bettermann]

Hi

I plan to have a calendar printed with my own images. One vendor says his raster is 75 lines per cm = 180 lpi. Based on a "Quality factor" of 2, the 9 MP images would have to be printed with 360 dpi and would become 18x24 cm small. That's all too small.  I have no experience with printing and upressing, so I wonder:

1-can I exspect reasonable quality in say 30x40 cm size?

2-What would give better results, upressing, or lowering the Quality Factor to 1.4?

3-I have looked for vendors in Germany so far. Only 3 offer A2 size, one of them up to A0. The latter admits that he can not guarantee consistant colors. I am not really happy with any of the offerings.

Would anyone know of a good maker of custom designed calendars ?
Ideally, the format should (for now...) be ca. 60x60 cm, which would allow for 30x40 cm images in both landscape and portrait orientation IF the design allowed the calendar text to be placed on the left and right edges as well as at bottom.

The price range I imagine is about 50 EUR for an A2 calendar @ 1 specimen.

Is there anything out there? Anything anyone of you has experience with?

Thank you! Hening.

[nemophoto]

I don't know if the service is available in Europe, but Snapfish actually produces great calendars. I was tremendously surprised. My sister did a calendar with simple snapshots of her daughter, and I was amazed how well it turned out. However, I think the limit is size is US Letter -- roughly A4. A2 is an enormous calendar size, so I'm not at all surprised you are having difficulty finding anyone to produce it, and at a reasonable cost. Part of the expense/difficulty is finding some who has spiral binding equipment that large.

Have you thought of printing your own, if you are only looking at a handful. I produce my own, via InDesign, and print it via my iPF6100 or my tabloid laser (which uses an approx 133line screen).

Good luck.

[Hening Bettermann]

Thank you for your answer, nemophoto!

In the meantime, I have found a vendor in Germany whom I will try: TKexe.de. His software allows everything I need, the calendar can be made in "all" languages, the max size is A2 (41x61 cm) for now, at my request he has promised to add 61x61 cm square and alert me by e-mail when it's there. The prints of this size are made on a Canon imagePROGRAF iPF 6100 with 12 colors, 1200 dpi - looks like yours, nemophoto.

The price for an A2 calendar (portrait or landscape) is 53.30 € ex shipping, incl 19% german VAT. Sizes up to this are printed on a Fujifilm Frontier 550. - So if he can offer A2 in landscape orientation, he must have access to spiral binding 61 cm.

No I have not thought of printing myself. Landscape photos must be big in my view, and a large enough printer is out of my reach.

Concerning my question 2 from my original post: I can now see that the question is nonsense. Upressing means resampling the image at lower resolution; that IS lowering the Quality Factor.

Good light! - Hening

[sakharov]

Well, I printed some calendars A3 and A2 size with Epson printer.
Inital images size was from 8 to 21mpix.
Different types of Hahnemuhle and Folex FineArt paper was used. Like Hahnemuhle Photo Rag, White Velvet and Folex Contour.
All images was upsampled to native printer resolution (360dpi) and shappened by PhotoKit Sharpener.
There was no visual diference in printed image resolution from 1meter viewing distance.

One thing - thick paper like Rag 308 has the tendency to curling.
So, thinner paper or canvas could be a better choice for calendar.