The Standard Deviation of High-Res Headshots

How do you define the 'high-res' part of 'high-res headshot' when it's contained in the sentence, "Please send me a high-res headshot for use in the printed show book"?

I'm not being a jackass here - I really want to know. Leave me an email, a comment, whatever. Because I've obviously been using a definition that most people don't subscribe to. For my current show, I've been sent dozens of speaker headshots which I've requested to be 'high-res for use in the printed show book.' They've ranged in size from 4k to 17mb. I'm not kidding - about either.

Honestly, I expected most to come in between about 800K and 2MB, with a few in the 3MB - 4MB range. A few years ago, before the advent of digital cameras and when we were using professional photogs and scanning in photos, I'd expect photos to be 5MB and up, probably saved as .TIF files. But I'm figuring everyone has a digital camera and everyone transfers files and everyone (at least in this industry) has seen the difference between a picture that's reasonably clear on the screen and how grainy it looks if you print it. The photos I've received however have been all over the map. If I plotted them out and ran an analysis, I'd find a standard deviation of over 3MB. But if I put them on a curve ALMOST NONE would be in the range I expected. Instead of a bell curve, it would look like an 'M', or a Bactrian Camel.

So in the absence of a tool to automate and simplify this process, I should probably figure out how to be clearer the first time out, and not have to exchange a bunch of emails, and risk missing print deadlines due to fuzzy pictures.

So a little help please - what does 'high-res' mean to you? What should I be asking for?

Comments

[Sue Pelletier]

We generally have pretty good luck just asking for 300 dpi or better. For some reason, this seems to make sense to people. Hope that helps.

[Tim Bourquin]

I've tried a dozen different things to get the point across.

I've found that saying, "We need a photo that is at least 1 Megabyte in file size" does the trick 99% of the time.

[Mike May]

Thanks Sue and Tim. I probably should have asked about 2 months ago...

[Michael Bodalski]

A bit late to leave a comment, but I remember this post when I came across...

http://www.forret.com/tools/megapixel.asp

A calculator that let's you estimate the file size of an image based on information you give it. Might be useful for either you or your presenters.