On Fri, 19 Nov 2010 22:02:41 +0000 (UTC), Tegger wrote:

Dr Rig wrote in :

I have a wall that I want to cover with roughly a 5 foot by 10 foot
"picture" frame of a google satellite view of the surrounding area.

Any idea how to accomplish the various technical parts?
- For the 'frame', I'm thinking of making it out of pine
- For the 'glass', I'm wondering how big a sheet of thin plastic I can
buy - For the 'printing', I'm not sure, but maybe Kinkos can print it?

Have any of you ever created a huge frame and/or printing of google
maps?

Can you give me some pointers to get me going in the right direction?




Kinko's will just farm it out to a "large format digital printing"
company. You might as well go direct.

Here's a start:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=large+format+digital+print ing&aq=f&aqi=g10&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

These firms can not only print your image, but dry-mount it to a
suitable rigid substrate. You can frame it later if you wish, or
they can frame it for you.

They can also print directly to something like Sintra or Komatex,
which are already rigid enough not to need mounting.

A BIG warning though, your file had better be of pretty high-resolution,
or it will look really crummy when printed that big (the company will
probably refuse to output a file they consider too low). You want
minimum 80 dpi at the native size (5'x10'). The appropriate file
will likely be on the order of 20 megabytes. Or more.

JPEGs are dangerous to print large, since they tend to have odd
squiggly areas at edges between color blocks.

Let's see,
60x120" @ 80dpi=46,080,000 pixels
At 24bit color depth, that's 138,240,000 bytes for that file. Not too
terribly huge, but remember your looking to start with a 46 MegaPixel
image. You would have to patch together a number of Google satellite
images to get this to work. Then see if you can find a print shop that can
do billboard type stuff. This usually comes like wallpaper, in strips.


--
HK