Taking on Retina: A Resolution Test
Printing resolution has always been a huge point of focus for Trust. We pride ourselves on our details, and we consistently critique our prints with magnifying glasses and high standards. Over the past few years we have pushed ourselves and our vendors to produce the highest resolution prints that we possibly can. Our mesh, emulsion, imaging, exposure, software, and processes have all been changed or updated to optimize our details. After all that work, it was extremely exciting when we realized our 600 dots per inch resolution nearly doubles the 326 pixels per inch of the iPhone 7 retina screen. It seemed impossible, so we created a scaled test and photographed the results. Here’s what we saw! (click on photos for full size)
From this perspective the phone and print look almost identical. At this distance the pixels of the phone aren’t perceptible to our eyes and it looks fairly sharp. Let’s get a little closer:
At this distance you can start to see the blurring caused by the pixels on the phone screen. At this magnification the fabric of the shirt begins to affect the edges of our print, but you can still see how much more crisp and exact our curves are. Let’s get even closer.
At this distance you can clearly see the blurring of the curves on the screen from the pixels. On the print side the edges are better but not perfect. It’s important to recognize that the fabric texture itself is the cause of these inconsistencies rather than our print resolution. This is the goal of what we’re doing here at Trust, to push our capabilities and technology so far that our printing is held back by the garment; never the other way around.