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printing a marquee

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DeLuSioNal29:


--- Quote from: Firebat138 on February 25, 2010, 01:45:56 pm ---I think you mean 72 dpi?  Correct...  720 dpi at marquee size would be a marquee at 6480 x 18000.  Most printers you wont see a difference over 200dpi.  I printed all my sideart, marquee and bezel here at work (see sig for pics )on a Hp DesignJet 5000 42" Plotter.  I created the files at 300 dpi, but the side file size was getting a little big... about 9000 x 18000, which is HUGE.... so I reduced it to 200...  I also plotted it out at 150 and you cant see a difference...    Good luck..

Camper

--- End quote ---
+1.  Mine were at 300dpi and they were HUGE.

ubiquityman:

This is not a terribly good photo, but I think it conveys the information.
On a typical 20" monitor, displaying at 1:1, it will end up being about 6x linear magnification.
Note the physical printout is quite small so you are seeing a very zoomed in image.

FYI, the backlit film in this picture is intended to be mounted in the Bezel space and LEDs will indicate which buttons are used with each game.  

The purpose of the picture is that I'm trying to show the resolution capability of the print service that does these backlit marquees.
I measured the LPI and it works out to be about 65lpi.  
At this resolution the gradients are smooth.

The bottom line:
A discerning eye can see the jaggies, but barely if viewed at 12 inches. (I consider myself to have a discerning eye.)
At 18 inches from the eye, the perceived resolution/frequency increases such that I cannot see the jaggies any more.

Since you don't have the printout, I can simulate the effect for you.  
Based on my calculations, if you have a 20" monitor and you put the picture below onto your monitor at 1:1, and then stand about 5.5ft back, that's close to what I'm seeing at 12in away from the paper.
Then if you stand back about 8ft 10in, and look, that's close to what I'm seeing at 18in.

My day-to-day printer at home is a near photo quality 1200x1200 DPI color Postscript laser, so my frame of reference may have skewed my initial comments, but
65 LPI (720 DPI) is really quite acceptable, and IMHO, certainly adequate for a marquee... it's just at lot more jagged than my 1200DPI laser

Trivia: As we move back away from an image, the apparent image frequency (this is sort of like image resolution) increases.
The frequency can get so high that it's beyond what our eyes can see.
For example, a series of very thin white and black lines will look grey (instead of separately being black and white) if viewed from far enough back.

Similarly, jaggies are no longer visible because of this increase in frequency (or increase in perceived resolution)

This examples better demonstrates human perception of resolution:
http://www.interestingillusions.com/en/top-rated/oliva-angry-calm/
In this link, you have to get about 8ft back from the screen to see the effect.

Also note that it'd be much more difficult to see jaggies in a smooth gradient image such as a photo.  (For example, look at the gradients inside the drawn buttons.  The jaggies are not apparent.)  
The triangles around the joystick are near the "worst case situation" for jaggies because of the abrupt color change (high frequency) occurring there.

The marquees I have would be better representations but unfortunately I don't have them with me because they are at my friend's place as he is assembling the cabinets.


Ginsu Victim:

I've got a reproduction Galaga marquee and a Neo Geo marquee, both from Emdkay, in front of me. They were made using vector graphics and I can hold them up close to my face and there is ZERO jagginess. Sorry, I don't have a camera that takes good up-close photos, and my scanner isn't set up.

These look great, though.

bpark42:

Just a point of clarification for everybody.  A lot of people misunderstand and misuse the term dpi.  dpi really should only be used to refer to the print resolution, the dots printed per inch, which has nothing to do with the actual pixel resolution of the image.  The image itself is really specifying ppi, or pixels per inch.  (A lot of the confusion over this comes from old software and standards actually calling this dpi instead of ppi.)  ppi is a way of telling reading applications what the intended physical size of the image should be, generally when printed.

That is all.  Carry on... ;D

deano7:

I'll post a high res picture of my marquee when it arrives.  I am looking forward to it after all of the debate...

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