Middle East's first gigapixel print in Dubai

Middle East's first gigapixel print took place in Dubai at Epson's booth of this year's Sign and Graphics, which was held from 15th to 17th September.

Printing such a high resolution photo results in more details than your eyes can discover. You can easily read the street signs and number plates on the opposite of the creek, but you might want to take a magnifier to check finer details like the facial expression of pedestrians.

Michael R. Ritter and his image

Epson team & Tom holding print

Visitors gaze final print

The print took place on the last day of the exhibition. Together with EFI we printed the 2GB TIFF, to which we converted it for printing, as the current versions of all the RIP Software out there couldn't manage to process PSB, Photoshop's large file format in which we had to save it, as it by far blows the 30.000 pixel limitation of Photoshop's standard PSD file format.

The resolution of the base image was 78.000 x 24.000 pixels which we scaled down to a sharpened version of 59.000 x 18.000, so we matched 300 DPI at the print width of 60" and could also fit inside the file size limit of 2GB for the TIFF format.

Epson's latest 64" Epson Stylus Pro 11880 equipped with Epson Ultrachrome™ K3 Vivid Magenta ink managed to print the image in around 90 minutes which were rather stunning and a lot of overwhelmed visitors started taking closer looks of the emerging print.

It was the first time someone printed a gigapixel image in the region of Middle East. In this case, 1,062,000,000 pixels, to be specific.

"Even I was overwhelmed by what we were printing here and what I was allowed to gaze at! I saw the image all days long on my screens, but what the printer produces is a completely different impression, it just blows you away. And sure, we've borders to cross, limits to break, but there's more to come to exceed your vision ..." says Michael R. Ritter of Fürstleur Photography.