I get asked about my experience printing panoramas.

I've used the Epson photo grade printers to good effect. However the consumer models are limited in the size of paper they will accept (or that you can buy--I've not yet seen any of the 44 inch long rolls of Epson photo paper at Fry's or anywhere else).

I have built a few giant panos which ended up being about 125MB. Each scanned image was about 1889x2801 pixels for a file size of 15.2MB. That was for a scene shot with 20mm Nikon lens. The stitched image was unwieldy in Photoshop, but I was working on a 9500/200 at the time... and I recall stitching with QTVRAS and giving it all my memory (which at that time was about 380MB). The only limitation I'm aware of with respect to QTVRAS file size limits is the 4000 pixel width limit. I didn't bump up against a file size issue on my big stitches. I prepared my output in Adobe Illustrator v7 and linked to the Photoshop stitched images (which were now in CMYK mode). Since the files added up to about 250MB, I had to submit them on a CDR disk. The service bureau complained that this job max'd out their Mac. Oh well.

I printed two panos up per page to an IRIS (but I don't recall the model number) at Linotext in downtown Palo Alto. The larger panos I printed this way were of course quite costly... I seem to recall between $120 and $200 per sheet. Framing was the icing on the cake... What I didn't anticipate was how much of the edges the framing shop would cover up in the process of matting the image. Since the big deal with panoramas is the 360 degree nature of the scene, people often looking to match up details from one edge to the other edge. Well those details were often hidden under the matting. Next time I'm going to duplicate some image on each edge from the other edge to make up for the matte. I printed a number of them with regular (the default) shiny IRIS paper, and those looked pretty good. Good enough to frame at least. I am hard pressed to detect any dots on any scene. Lots of people have raved over the final quality (but it does look better under glass I think). I suspect the archival story is probably not good with this paper. We'll see--they are hanging on my wall. Then, I had read so much about the watercolor paper, that I decided I have to try it. Well it was an expensive mistake. The colors were so muted that my lush outdoor scenes looked like they had been sitting in the sun for a year. Not the effect I wanted.