Wide format printers are an ideal means of producing poster-size images of archaeological artifacts, art, and sculpture to enhance public education.

Wide format printers can produce the quality and size needed to help tourists understand the iconography and epigraphy of Maya stelae. For example, here is a wide format print being produced by an Ilford Imaging IJT wide format printer. This is the Ilford version of the ColorSpan wide format printer. Out of the dozens of potential wide format printers we selected this particular model because it does the best job of reproducing the original colors.

It would be possible to make a dual-panel exhibit: one panel with the stelae as seen here. The adjacent panel could be arranged with the complete hieroglyphic translation and iconographic explanation, carefully overlaid on top of the photographic image. This way the tourist could get factual archaeological information in an easy-to-digest manner.

Such a solution would require a separate project, but it shows the potential of wide format printing and digital technology.

Of course to get the true original colors you need color management such as ColorBlind software, and it helps to have access to the original monument to double-check what the original color is. Since the lamps used in the original photography will alter the "true" color, and since portable electric generators do not produce clean enough power to allow tungsten lights to reach their full 3200 Kelvin spectrum, the color is going to be somewhat different in the print than on the original stone, but this can be fixed with proper digital imaging. The print seen here is first trial print.

Other printers are made for producing signs, that is, for dramatizing the colors, producing eye-catching contrast. The ColorSpan, in distinction, is made for reproducing photographs, indeed another model of ColorSpan, the Giclee fine art printer, is used to make fine art prints.

To enlarge the original 4x5 transparency we used an Imacon vertical scanner, at about 4000 dpi, courtesy of the Center for Advanced Imaging (St Louis Community College). Since the original picture was taken from a wobbly pole beams of a thatch-roofed hut which covers the stelae, there was no way to have a wobble-free tripod arrangement (especially since the photographer also had to be suspended up in the air over the monument, which is flat on the ground).

For additional information how these transparencies are scanned check out www.flatbed-scanner-review.org to see which printers produce such quality, look at www.FineArtGicleePrinters.org. Links are at the bottom of this page.

Original photography courtesy of permission from the Department of Archaeology, Belize, copyright by the Dept. of Archaeology. Photo and imaging by Nicholas Hellmuth, Dept of Anthropology, Washington University in St. Louis. Printing courtesy of Ilford Imaging, Dreieich (Frankfurt), Germany. RIP by Lothar Kronenberg, Ilford Imaging, on a RIPStar software RIP NT workstation. Original photography, Linhof Technikardan, Schneider lens.