Digital Home Thoughts: DPI Print Calculator at Scantips.com

I found a very useful tool today at Scantips.com: it's a DPI calculator to assist you with figuring out what DPI you'll get when you print an image at a certain size. DPI stands for "dots per inch", and it's a measurement of print quality. DPI can be tricky to calculate, especially if you're not math inclined. For instance, if you have an image that's only 800 x 600 in resolution, doing an 8x10" print will result in a mere 80 dpi - not enough for a nice quality print. A 4x6" print will give you 133 dpi, which is passable. The site says that 300 dpi is the minimum required for a reasonable quality print, but in some tests that I did last year, I was surprised to find that 150 dpi prints were nearly indistinguishable from the 300 dpi prints.