Designing For Gigantic Plasma

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parris

Guest
I am a designer accustomed to developing for the small screen (web). A museum client has just purchased a 63 inch Samsung plasma and wants me to design a piece for it. I am aware of potential burn in issues so the piece will be animated. I have read that this plasma has a native resolution of 1366x768 and a viewable screen size of 54.965 inches wide by 30.927 inches high. I need to integrate images of artwork and must scan slides. What sort of resolution should I scan at? I am used to 72dpi at 100% for web. What can a large plasma support? 300dpi at 100%? Help! I would love some insight. Sincerely, Parris
 

Joe Fernand

Outstanding Member
AVForums Sponsor
parris

There's only one answer to your question - either ship the Display to your studio or load up some samples and go view them on the Display.

I'd also recommend you load the images onto the actual PC/graphics card (or Mac) that'll be used in the installation.

The processing in the Display can and will do odd things with your images - test all of your animations (again on the install PC/Mac)

Think of your 'piece' as a huge screen saver and you should be fine with screen burn - maybe have a look at a few of the Digital Art or Aquarium discs that are out there; they all work as screen savers.

And try and get a self rebooting routine in the PC/Mac - saves burning an 'I'm broken' message box into your Display.

Best regards

Joe
 

stevelup

Distinguished Member
Hi

The DPI of this large display is much much lower than you think.

Remeber - the bigger the display, the lower the DPI.

Your panel is only 25dpi (1366 pixels / 55" = 25dpi)

Steve
 
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spicy_fajita

Guest
Not an expert but the dpi that you want to scan at depends on the size of image you're scanning and the size you want it on screen. For example, if you want an image to take up the entire screen (1366x768 pixels) then to have the best quality you want at least 1366x768 pixels. If the original image is 4 inches by 2.2 inches then you'll want a scan dpi of at least 342 dpi. When you have this image in Windows you can change its dpi to 72/96dpi for it to fit the screen. Windows won't know what size of screen you're using but you simply want it to take up 1366x768 pixels and the handiest way of doing this is to set the dpi to 72dpi (I think) and resize the image to whatever number of pixels you desire (1366x768).

This is the same for web development, you usually should scan at a higher dpi and then modify the image to change the dpi to 72dpi and resize the image to size you want on screen. Note changing dpi has no affect on image quality, it simply changes the size of the image when printed. For displaying however the dpi is set at 72 or 96 but this is the dpi no matter what the size of the display. An image taking up half the screen on my old 14" takes up half the screen on my 21" screen when the resolutions are the same.

For equivalent printed image sizes, for more detail you need higher dpi. For a screen (unlike printing on paper) you cannot fit in any more dots that the screen was built with so it can be easier to change the dpi to 72 and resize the image to the resoultion that you require on screen, i.e. 1366x768 or whatever.

Note also for web development you desire the smallest image sizes for the limited bandwidth but for a dedicated display connected to a local machine you can have larger images and simply resize them at run time in what ever application you are using.

In this post I'm assuming that you'll have your computer's resolution matched to the plasma's. Its much easier when dealing with computer displays to forget about dpi and simply work with pixels or percentages of the screen resolution.
 

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