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Anyone have any experience with an online large format printing service.
When I say large, I mean much larger than 24x36. I want to print some of my images "mural sized". I have seen large prints for sale in stores on canvas that were printed at sometimes 6'x6'. I just didn't know where to look, or who was reliable.
Thanks in advance.
Dave.
I haven't tried myself, but Bay Photo seems to have a lot of happy customers, one of them is my neighbor and friend.
http://www.bayphoto.com/
Arnt
+1. I've never printed anything mural sized, but I use them for anything that hangs on a wall. Great shop.Quote:
Originally Posted by ahab1372
http://www.digitalroom.com/
This company was very reasonable with pricing. Many of them have silly high prices, calling it giclee and showing $10k pedestals and custom 14k gold plated frames on their websites, but what was called "Large Format Printing" seemed very utilitarian (the original name), forward and honest. I tried a similar company and they send me crap stretcher bars, cheap canvas and the ink was nasty
Large Format Printing, or Large Format Posters is what it was called last year. Apparently (they sent an email around) they changed name to digital room. I have no reason to believe they changed prices much or equipment. I dont know really.
I had to use canvas printing to print panoramics, I did about 60 inches wide. to simplify things, I would put 3 pano's on an order. I used heavy duty stretcher bars, so you have to leave blank canvas area on all 4 sides. They give you about 3 inches all around as freebie, so you would need to allow about 7" in between each of the 3 strips of "photo area" and you cut down the center of it to make 3 strips with about 3.5" on each side of the 3 pano's. This then wraps around the stretcher bars on all 4 sides and you staple it, after it is pulled tight and the corners are wrapped correctly.
I was giving room for error, and bled over onto my gallery wrap about 1/8" purposefully in my order so I had to pain the sides with white gesso paint to keep the gallery wrap presentation. You get about 1/16" of an inch to play with when assembling the stretcher bars, plus you can saw them smaller. The point is, order the printing exactly the size you want. They delivered it very precisely.
Delivery was in a tube, heavy duty, size was no issue. I think the last tube I ordered was about 6ft in length.
I hope it is the same company because they were great.
The canvas was good quality, the ink was beautiful. It must not be touched, or you can "compress" or ding it, just like a matte finish paper print. It seemed like a very durable ink, appearance almost like a powder coat, with each minute bit of powder as a pixel, but you could drag your finger on it and it wont hurt it. Just saying, be careful with the finished product. After stretched (mounted some may say) there is not much to hold onto, the face of the printed canvas is out there in front, so you can only hold onto the inside edges of the back of the frame unless you have a crossbar built into the back.
I can only suggest that if you do something as big as 6'x6', make sure you use heavy duty stretcher bars. Even the heavy duty long sides I bought at utrect art in NYC were warped, so I had to cut off all the dove tails and staple them on the corners then let the canvas hold them together. For big art like that, you could consider aluminum for the weight issue, definitely use cross bars and supports, but try assembling before hand and number them, keep sandpaper handy if using wood. Also, you may want to let the stretchers climatize, becuase they can warp later. Probably a reason for using aluminum, but its all for another debate.
Give them a try. Its really worth printing up something larger than a computer screen. Its disturbing how some photographers go through life without displaying their work on anything but a computer screen. Print it BIG and hang it in the home. Make xmas time fun! Birthdays, woot! Canvas prints make good presents! I had to use canvas because of the odd size of pano's not being easily framed, it turned out to be a great medium.