How Large of a Print Can I Order?
My camera has a 24MP sensor to capture the essence of the moment in your photoshoot, or the pictures I take in the wild. The sensor will produce a digital image that is rendered in pixels. A pixel is a point in the photograph that represents the color of that point. The number of pixels in the digital negative is called the resolution. My camera's resolution is 4000 pixels by 6000 pixels.
The other part of the puzzle is how this relates to the the physical print size. Since the physical print is an actual measurable width and length, this uses a measure called Dots Per Inch, or DPI for short. This is how many pixels will fit into a physical inch of the print. The smaller the print, the more pixels that will be in each of the inches, and the more detailed the print will be.
One final piece is to consider the viewing distance that you will be viewing the photo. The further away you are, the less detailed the picture needs to be. All of this is very similar to TV resolution. Everyone want's a 4K TV, but it's not always needed. If you have a 100" TV and you're sitting 4 feet from it, you'll want a 4K+ TV to see the details. If you're sitting 20 feet from it, all of those details are lost.
My recommendation for the max size of a print from my camera taking into account its resolution and the DPI of the print would be 24 inches by 36 inches. That is using a DPI of 160, which would lose the finer details, but a print that large you wouldn't be up that close to view it.
