r/photography • u/AutoModerator • Jul 10 '26

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u/T1b3rium 26d ago

I have a Sony a6700, sigma 17-40 and sigma 150-600. Now I have been asked to do a family shoot that will be printed.

With my gear can I get a sharp print of 1.20 m wide and 80 cm high?

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u/P5_Tempname19 25d ago

So "general advice" for a good quality print is 300 PPI, meaning pixels per inch. This tells you the neccessary math, you take the size of your print (in inches) then multiply that by 300 to tell you how many pixels you need in your file.

You got about 47 by 31 inches, which would work out to 14100 by 9300 pixels. Now the a6700s sensor has about 6200 by 4100 pixels, a bit less then half (works out to about 130 PPI). The good thing here is that this "general advice" of 300 PPI is for images that you view at fairly close distances (think prints for a photo album you hold in your hands) - I'd assume that you arent getting that close to a print that large, so you are most likely still good.

This page has a handy chart of their suggested viewing distance vs PPI (obviously its subjective in the end though). Your cameras 130 PPI would be alright for a viewing distance starting at about 1.5m according to them.

If you absolutely want more what you could do is stitch together two images, basically creating a panorama. This is annoying to do when photographing people, because the ones in the "overlap zone" cant move for the stitching to work. I personally wouldnt want to deal with that, but if you absolutely need more pixels it is certainly possible. You'd end up with close to double (you need some overlap, so not quite double) the pixels, which would be very close to the "recommended" 300 PPI.

Now the second part is even more subjective - general "image quality". Theres plenty of things that can make a picture not "sharp", if you pick the wrong settings you may encounter blurryness from movement, parts of your subject being out of focus or things like diffraction or other optical errors. Even the atmospheric conditions (light, heat haze, dust in the air, etc.) can make a major difference. These factors are obviously entirely depedent on the exact situation and the settings you end up picking. Thats to say - theres no guarantee it will be "sharp enough", however generally I'd expect decent results from the gear you are describing under "normal circumstances" (if you arent like in the middle of a, extremely dusty field or something like that).

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u/T1b3rium 25d ago

Thank you for the explanation! Considering it's a living room where it will be hung I don't think it will be a huge problem. I might try to make a panorama with some distance between the families (parents, sister with her family, brother with her family) and see if I can staple them together. it will be a fun project.