Imagine There's An Image

Sure!

Here are two prints I made this weekend. The slight cropping I did on the vertical photo resulted in a 12-1/2" x 17" print, while the horizontal shot stretched to 12-1/2" x 18-1/2", which is a big as I make 'em on my 13x19 Canon i9900 printer.

The prints are excellent - good enough quality that I would offer them for sale. They're certainly better than anything that I was able to get printed in my youth from Kodachrome or Ektachrome slides.

I also made a 12-1/2" x 17" print of Red Boat in Fog, which I matted and framed - and I've already had some people express interest in buying it.

Would I say the large prints are as good as those from a DSLR, like my Digital Rebel? Well, not entirely. If you put your nose up to the print and look closely at evenly-toned areas, like clear sky, you'll see more noise in the A620 prints. But at normal viewing distances, it isn't a problem for many photos.

For prints like the two shown here, there is a very small ratio of evenly-toned areas to highly-detailed areas, and the highly-detailed areas make up the main subject, so your eye doesn't tend to go to any areas that might be noisy. In a photo like Margueritaville, however, a large part of the picture is of the sort that shows noise - and it is more obvious in that photo - you can see it in the water. Whether it's too much noise will depend on the viewer and other subjective matters - for example, the boat's owner probably wouldn't mind very much.

My overall verdict is that the Canon A620 is certainly capable of making images that can be sucessfully printed at 13x19. The key is sticking to ISO 50 - maybe ISO 100 - and watching out for large, evenly-toned areas that might show a lot of noise. The bottom line is that I'm very happy with the A620 - it fits the bill for what I was looking for... a take-along-anywhere-and-everywhere camera that can also provide big prints.