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Robert Lauriston informed me, as he does:
>Pixels per inch is no more meaningful than dpi.
Digital cameras use pixels. They do not use "dots" which is what the D
in DPI refers to. The dots are related to holes in a printer's screen.
Hardly anyone is printing documents this way anymore; most are also
printing pixels, and are using media that are smaller than the printed
pixels themselves (toner, or microscopic squirts of ink).
>What you get from a digital camera is a grid of X pixels
>by Y pixels that bears no fixed relationship to any
>particular number of inches. E.g. my passable consumer-grade
>camera's default image size is 3264x2448, which at 300
>dpi would be 10.88" x 8.16".
Who prints at 10.88x8.16? Or rather, who makes a frame that size? See,
this is why math and art give each other the stink-eye across the table,
even though they can't live without each other.
On a screen, inches have no meaning, but in actually working with your
photos in a real-world sense, they do. The sensor (the digital "film")
in the camera is designed to produce a given print size with a given
number of pixels. In the case of your camera, they expect you to
probably print a few 8x10s and mostly 4x5s, so they are providing you
with some crop space (~.44 x .8" on a 4x5) and the equivalent of up to a
600dpi print. So you get a nice, clean photo you can put in the album,
and no one cares much what the camera's "megapixels" were. When you send
your photos in to a digital lab, they don't even ask you about DPI, or
PPI, they just do the math for you and tell you what photo sizes will
work with the total number of pixels you're providing, and that if you
print bigger than that, they're not responsible for a blocky, pixilated
image.
Messing with the pixel count and sizes of a photo too much, especially
smaller resolution photos or clipart images you find online, gets into
resampling, which is fine for personal stuff (that holiday newsletter
for Grandma), but not something you want to do professionally. Getting a
knowledgeable photographer with digital expertise and a high-res DSLR to
take your shots will get you what you need without you having to worry
too much about the details.
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