On Tue, 10 Dec 1996, Stephen Nowlin wrote: > My experience with scanned and computer printed images is that they do not > yet match the resolution of film-based prints. They're close, but not > quite there yet. Their longevity is also questionable -- I believe I can > already see some deterioration of digital images printed 8 x 10" after only > two years. They are, however, less expensive and the resolution is > acceptable enough that I have opted for using them to send to newspaper > media in press packets. In my experience this is true. We had some poster-size images produced for a show from digital images created on the computer in Adobe Photoshop. They were on the soft and blurry side, but they were being presented more to create an atmosphere for a video installation than as information, so that looked okay. The place that produced them would only guarantee them for 2 months against fading. We had them displayed under relatively low light levels, so they held up well, and looked fine when they were used at the next venue several months later. A different artist recently showed me an Iris print, made on an ink-jet printer, also poster-size, which was very crisp and detailed and which he expects to last indefinitely, although I can't verify that (do any of the conservators on the list know?). As Ivy Strickler pointed out in another post on this topic, there is a real art to scanning and to planning your image while you're working in Photoshop to reproduce well on your intended output device. You just can't expect it to come out the way it looks on your screen automatically--it has to be planned correctly from the beginning. In the case I describe above, (the first artist I mention) I learned this the hard way. The artist who produced the images *thought* he knew a lot more about Photoshop than he actually did. Consequently, the company that produced the poster-sized images had a very difficult time working with his output. --Helen Glazer Exhibitions Director Goucher College, Baltimore, MD, USA [log in to unmask]