Wonder how large you can print? You’d be surprised

Taking photos is great, but then we want to print them. And 6x4.5 inches doesn’t really cut it. At least we want to enjoy our finest moments. So the question is how big you can print your photos.

A general rule you’ll find online is that a print should be 300ppi unless you print billboard size. For the sake of assuming that you don’t live in a humongous warehouse, I’ll skip this option. So, the formula is pretty simple. You take the resolution in pixels from the camera and device it by a resolution of 300PPI. The result will look something like this (please note that this is an example for the Nikon D780):

Caculation for the theoretical print size, example for a Nikon D780

As you can see, you can print pretty big with a 24MP camera. However, there’s more. I recently printed two of my photos that were shot on a full-frame camera. Instead of sticking to 20 x 13 inches I went bigger at 32 x 24 inches. Please note that this was shot and scanned using an old 35mm camera. I will show you the result here:

Shot on a film camera using Kodak E100, scanned on Noritsu scanner. Equivalent to Nikon D780

I’m buying a frame right now and can show you the photo hanging on the wall from a close-up perspective. Trust me when I say that the photo looks amazing, and I think I could’ve gotten a lot bigger if I had wanted to.

So, I’m pretty confident that if you want to print big, a 24MP camera is more than enough. If you go bigger, like 45MP, you should be set for fantastic prints. I hope that this will help you and get you motivated to print some of your shots.