Hi everyone-

I would really appreciate any help that anyone can offer here! I am a bit of a novice, but have done some research. My application is using images from my digital camera for Sedona, AZ real estate photos for color real estate brochures & pictures for my clients after showing, so they can remember the houses. I just recently purchased a Xerox(Phaser)740 P that is a color laser printer with resolution of 1200 x 1200 DPI. I want my camera that I purchase to sink as seemlessly as possible with my high resolution color prints.

I have been looking at the following cameras under $1000:

Sony DSC S70 Sony DSC D770 - I like the 5x optical lens, but it seems out of date Nikon Coolpix 990 Olympus 3030

It seems to me that some important categories of consideration are the following:

Pixels Optics, lens quality lag time - could be really ennoying memory storage type download capabilities - USB, twain support.

Does this sound correct?

Also - How exactly does pixel count on the camera correspond with actual print size on the laser printer & how does this sink with the relolution of my printer & output size. I have looked, and researched, and found this to be less then clear.

Thank you!!!

-- Brad Haimbaugh (bradhaimbaugh@hotmail.com), May 08, 2000

Answers

Pixel resolution and printer resolution do not really correlate. The printer resolution determines how large a dot the printer uses to produce part of an image. Since a printed image is generally made up of a combination of dots to produce a certain shade of grey or a colour, the smaller the dot size the smaller the combination of dots required to produce the shade. Each of these dot combinations coreseponds to a pixel in the final image. The printer software takes the information from the digital image and converts it to an image that it can print. Generally for usable images from a digital file, you need between 150 and 300 pixels per inch from your digital file. For discussion sake, you need a print with about 200 pixels per inch. From a 1200X 1600 pixel camera, you can get a decent 6X8" print from that size of a file. If you want to fudge a bit you can go down to 150 or even 100dpi. In that case the image from your file will increase up to 12X 18 except that it may look a bit fuzzy close up.

Hope this helps

-- Jonathan Ratzlaff (jonathanr@clrtech.bc.ca), May 08, 2000.