How big a Print can I make with my iPhone

I rarely use the phone on my iPhone 5 except to take a few snap shots, or to maybe capture a news-worthy scene when I'm traveling without my DSLR. I share the pictures with other folks online, but that's about it. I never tried to make a print from any of those pictures. I'm not even sure how many megapixels the iPhone 5 has ? Maybe I'll google it someday. During my lunch break I decided to read an article in the December 2018 copy of Outdoor Photographer. In this article the author who is a avid photographer and also owns a fine-art print shop in Monterrey California,describes the iPhone XS Max.

 

According to the author, he is making 31x36" prints and even 36x42" prints with files from the iPhone XS Max". He says the prints look just as good as the prints made from a fine DSLR ! This is amazing for such a small sensor. Not only that, this phone can take pictures down to 1/3 of second although you might need a tripod. I'm not saying that I'm going to sell all my gear and purchase this phone, but you got to wonder what Apple technician are doing with their algorithms to produce such quality pictures from a tiny sensor. I was always impressed at how the iPhone was able to take pretty good pictures under dim lighting situations, something which I struggled with even with my best cameras and lenses.

 

A few weeks ago I was at a race-track and noticed that many people in the audience were taking pictures of the races horses with their iPhones ? I chuckled to myself since I had the shutter speed on my camera set to 1/1250 of a second which is about right for fast moving subjects, however come to find out that the iPhone 7 has a maximum shutter speed of 1/8000 of a second !

He says the prints look just as good as the prints made from a fine DSLR !

The only way I ever assess whether one print looks as good as another is to look at the prints myself. I've heard a lot of people and photographers say that "this or that looks great" or "this looks as good as that" only to see a very big difference myself when I see what they're talking about.

 

I just had a show that included about 50 prints, some of them shot with an iPhone. The iPhone prints looked just fine, especially considering the kind of shots they were. The dslr shots looked fine. There was a noticeable difference to my eye between the iPhone prints and the dslr prints, even at 8x10 sizes.

iOS 12 is the last upgrade your iPhone 5 can handle. It's time to move on. I just upgraded from a model 6 to a new iPhone XR. It's only slightly larger and has the best battery life available. I'm sure its 12 MP camera could make a good 16x20" print, given good light, an appropriate subject, and no digital cropping in-camera. Most of the time you will look at iPhone images on a screen the size of a playing card. This is hardly the way to make a critical assessment. Consider that your phone is probably available nearly all the time, while your main camera(s) stay home. That's a major plus.

30 by 40 cm, and they won't still be as good as from an APS camera with really sharp lens. Proved. I tell this according to professional criteria of quality.

Front page, not quality center fold? <- You can print as big as you like. Billboards look good enough, if they are distant enough. A phone centerfold could look good enough pinned to your wall, but might not shine on your locker door's inside at eye level.

Since you own a working phone (I'm too cheap to get mine a SIM card and not happy that Apple demands those), why aren't you doing a shoot out against your camera(s), to see what you'll get?

The previous owner of my iphone IV happy snapped 4K stills that sometimes looked acceptable other times suffering from artifacts. - More computational photography and highest IQ settings will probably help the phone results.

I won't get enthusiastic and rush, to get hold of a more recent phone, because of it's camera. IMHO the percentage of total phone price getting into it is too low to justify the investment and I don't like the ergonomics either. - I'd happily splurge on a dumb phone, built into a conventional battery grip, though.

Between 1950 and 1990, Kodak displayed backlit transparancies as wide as the main hall at Grand Central Station in New York. The 'Colorama' was 18 feet tall and 60 feet wide, and was an advertisement for Kodak film. Most were made from larger format originals, but at one point they defied 'conventional wisdom' by creating this enlargement from a 35mm film original. They said it couldn't be done, but it was.

 

It is a fundamental fact of optical physics that making an enlargement of the image also enlarges any grain or other defects that might exist in the image. As the degree of enlargement increases, a point will be reached where those defects will be visible enough to detract from the overall image. And that's as far as you can go.

 

But Kodak's experiment proved three things. First, the higher the quality of the original exposure, the more enlargement the image can handle. I suspect that the image displayed at Grand Central was done using a good camera, with an extremely sharp lens, at optimum aperture, and with the camera on a tripod. Second, the threshold of allowable image degradation is a subjective matter - some people naturally focus more on the overall image and less on the details, and are therefore willing to accept more degradation. And as a corollary to this point, the nature of the image is a critical factor - an image that contains lots of fine details is harder to enlarge than an moody image with areas of abstract tonality. Third, and most important, viewing distance is critical - you can make an enormous enlargement that contains a lot of degraded detail, but that degradation won't be visible if the image is viewed at a distance. This is something that art photographers have struggled with for years - contact prints from a 4x5 negative are beautiful, but you have to stand very close to the image to see them. If you are making an image that is to be viewed from a distance, then it must be larger. The display image at Grand Central Station was enormous, but it was hung high in the air where it was seen by people walking through the main hall - 30-50 feet away.

 

So the bottom line is that you can make a print from an image captured on an iPhone as large as you want it to be, but you must understand that as the enlargement increases, the detail in the image will degrade, but also that degradation will be less visible if that final print is viewed from a distance. And whether that degradation is a problem is a subjective matter that is related to the nature of the image.

 

How long is the string? As long as you want it to be.

My 2 cts:

 

The are a couple of variables that determine whether a 'large print' from an IPhone (or whatever other camera/device) will be any good:

- first off: the type of photo, its purpose and its desired resolution from the viewing distance. There's nothing intrinsically bad about grainy photos, photos that are less than '100% sharp' or blurred photos. Any photo that you consider good enough is good enough.

- some technical stuff:

> the optical resolution of an IPhone lense is always going to be less than a DSLR lense that costs $500-$5000. But it will often be 'fit for purpose'

> the digital resolution of an Iphone is less than a modern DSLR (see Iphone resolutions) but again will often be 'fit for purpose'

- Viewing distance: The 'resolution' and sharpness that viewers of a print (of any size) perceive is to some extent dependent on their viewing distance. The resolution of an A4 format photo viewed at 2-3 meters distance may look very different than when viewed close up at 10 cm distance. Again, note that 'low resolution' and 'unsharpness' are not necessarily negative!

- In principle, you can print any digital image in any size. So the real question is: if you printed an IPhone phone at the size you want (to be viewed at the viewing distance you anticipate), does the (perceived) resolution match the photo or detract from it?

 

I'm a volunteer for a local photo-festival and I've seen many exhibits that (at 3 x2 metres) are deliberately low-resolution. Others are deliberately 'high resolution'. Most 3x2 metre photos are sufficiently sharp and have have sufficient resolution for viewers at 2-3 metres distance.

 

One more thing: You could use something like Photoshop (and possibly Gimp) to increase the resolution) of (IPhone) photos. Photoshop has of course no more 'digital' information than in the original image. But when 'expanding' the image, it can "interpolate" between differences in the original image and fill in the gaps in the 'larger' image as best it can.

 

Hope this helps,

 

Mike

Some shots are well suited to a phone. They have wide angle lenses and sensors that are fine in bright light, and aren’t as quick as DSLRs - so if you want to shoot a nonmoving subject with wide angle in daylight, it’s not bad. Recent phones also have much more powerful CPUs than most cameras, and a lot of work has gone into maximizing the automatic processing they do. For example, some phones will shoot in low light by blending a rapid sequence of shots automatically, or will do an hdr automatically. You often won’t realize what tricks it’s using.

 

But I’ll still take an interchangeable lens camera over a phone for all the times I want to take a shot that not a wide angle of a nonmoving subject in bright light.

Between 1950 and 1990, Kodak displayed backlit transparancies as wide as the main hall at Grand Central Station in New York. The 'Colorama' was 18 feet tall and 60 feet wide, and was an advertisement for Kodak film. Most were made from larger format originals, but at one point they defied 'conventional wisdom' by creating this enlargement from a 35mm film original. They said it couldn't be done, but it was.

 

 

For anyone who is interested in more about the Colorama:

OP, don't know, but great question. If you can shoot something with iPhone with highest res and with a hi grade dslr or mirrorless I will make for free a 13 x 17 inch print of each to compare. (Offer subject to my approval of image.)

 

Everyone's standards are different. Some brag of big prints from little sensors, 35mm film, etc, but they are just garbage...big, giant fuzzy garbage prints.

How big a Print can I make with my iPhone

 

 

Much depends on the Viewing Distance.

 

 

WW