Photo printing

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What is a good soloution fot printing digital pictuars at an as good as posibal quality for use at home, private?

-- Bisschop Jan (jan.x2@village.uunet.be), May 01, 1998

Answers

The rule of thumb I've read is that a photograph has about 200dpi worth of information. So if you're sending your output to a continuous tone device (like a dyesub printer) 200dpi should be plenty. A halftone device like an inkjet printer is going to use more dots to accomplish the same result, but if you provide it with 200dpi worth of information (ie 1000x1400 for a 5x7) it at least has a chance to produce photographic quality output.

That aside, I'd say that the #1 factor in getting photo-like output is to use a continuous tone device. Your monitor is a continuous tone device with a resolution around 72-100dpi, so if your work looks good onscreen it will probably look good at the same physical size on something like a dye sub printer or a Fuji Pictography.

-- Ben Jackson (ben@ben.com), May 02, 1998.


Thanks for the answer Ben. I have been a bit confused by the different meanings of DPI. I have a Powermac with a 17 inch Sony monitor. I am having my film images scanned onto PhotoCD and then I am manipulating them in Adobe PhotoDeluxe 2.0 (I am in the process of learning Photoshop) I have an Epson Stylus Color 600 printer which supposedly has the ability to print at 1440 by 720 DPI. Are you saying that I shouldn't send an image to the printer with more than 200 dPI of information? The Adobe documentation suggests that 360 DPI may be best suited to a 1440 printer. I'm trying to figure this out, because smaller files are quicker to work with. Can you shed any light?

Steve Rosenblum

-- Steve Rosenblum (srosenblum@maybaum.med.umich.edu), May 27, 1998.


Steve, Since it takes 3 dots of color information (red, green, blue or cyan, magenta, yellow) to produce one color image dot, theoretically a 720dpi jet printer will require only 240 (240 * 3)dpi of file information to produce optimum results. The 1440 portion of a 720/1440 printer is interpolation and really does not require 480dpi of information. Actually sending more information to the printer than it needs will deterirate the image more than help it.

-- Peter Vaktor (pvak@cam.org), May 29, 1998.

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