The Huge THRILL of Digital Prints

by Manjula Padmanabhan in Random Thoughts Dept
     
 
 
 The pictures are of one of my digital prints alongside the tiny original. In the third one I’ve included a roll of clear mailing tape to help establish scale. The original is just under 10 inches long while the enlargement is 32 inches long.
 
I wanted to take quick, grainy, amateurish photographs to post here at my blog because for me it is ah-MAAAAZing to be able to do this: to take a modest little scribble and blow it up large, on great paper and with very good print-resolution. All while sitting at my computer in Newport, RI, scanning the original, posting a few links, setting up FolioTwist and ImageKind to accept payment and … ta-daaa! One week later, I get this vast print.
 
You can’t see the quality of the resolution in this photograph, but believe me, it’s like silk-screen. You can feel the ink on the paper. Blackest black on whitest white. 
 
It may seem as if this is no different to spending a little time at a Kinko’s or some other photocopying facility but it really IS. The end result is like a museum shop’s printed posters. And without all that struggling with inscrutable machines, slightly superior shop non-assistants and the considerable expense, because enlargements cost a fair amount. And the time. This print, by contrast, costs $42, unframed, plus shipping. Ordering took about as long as it takes to buy books on Amazon.
 
I’ve worked with so many different kinds of printing facilities — from commercial letter-press, using lead type, where my line-drawings were rendered as zinc plates nailed onto bits of wood (seriously!) to … photo-offset printing in glossy magazines to … well, now this.
 
Takes my breath away. 
 
 
 
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