CP overlay material options?

[releasedtruth]

Well gents, I printed my first CPO on toughprint with 2mil lam on both sides. Nice thickness, etc, but the printers only do 100lpi and my art is nearly 200lpi so I wondered what other options I'd have for printing. It came out nice enough, but an error in placement on my part means a reprint.

My CP is wood with 1/8" plexi on top. I don't want to adhese it down so....

[releasedtruth]

Update:

I used a toughprint with 3mil lamination on both sides, the plexi holds it down with 2 binding posts providing extra support on the bottom edges

[Oddfeld]

Nice thickness, etc, but the printers only do 100lpi and my art is nearly 200lpi so I wondered what other options I'd have for printing.

I think you're confusing lpi (lines per inch on the final output device) with dpi (dots per inch, such as the resolution of your image). You can't have artwork that is 'nearly 200lpi' unless you've halftone screened it yourself - it's a function of the printer's resolution, not the resolution of your image, and the lpi will be a lot smaller than the dpi resolution of the printer, which is why a 300dpi image is considered high res even though you might be printing it on something that prints at 1200dpi, say.

Let's say you have an output device that prints at 1200dpi, if you were to print a graphic in a solid colour (like it prints in CMYK and you have a logo made up of solid black or solid cyan or whatever) then you could in theory print at the output resolution of the device and print a 1200dpi black logo. As soon as you print a multitonal graphic, the printer can't print at its output resolution since it needs to make up your mixed-ink colours and gradients and stuff as halftones, like a dither pattern of dots and gaps between dots. You can't print grey by printing a '50% black' patch of ink, either it prints a black dot or it doesn't - you'd print a patch of grey made up of half black dots and half blank white paper- this pattern of dots will have a pitch measured in lpi. Conventional wisdom is to print raster images at a resolution in dpi of about 1.5 to 2 times the line screen in lpi. Crappy print with huge halftone dots (like old laserprinters or cheap newsprint) may be about 60lpi, a typical magazine 133lpi, higher quality (books and stuff) 150lpi, coffee-table art books 175lpi. So, if you send a 300dpi photo to an old 60-lpi laserprinter it will look no better than using a 120dpi photo since the halftone screen is too coarse to pick up the extra detail in the higher resolution image.

100lpi is perfectly reasonable for a large format printer for display graphics, and your image sounds about the right resolution for this screen. Printing your 200dpi image at a higher linescreen may even make it look worse since you may start showing up pixellation etc, which would be hidden by coarser halftoning.