Question about printing from my digital camera.

[MuffD]

What is a good resolution to print my pictures at from my camera?
The camera says I'm taking them at 1600x1200 but I'm also looking at the DPI in photoshop and it says like 72 or something. When I print these, some don't look so great so would increasing the DPI increase the quality of the prints?

Thanks
Ariel

 

[moid]

I have the Kodak DC280. When opened, the photos are 72 dpi, but you will notice the size of them (in inches) are huge! If you use a photo printing program that fits the image to the size wanted, the quality will turn out just fine. I can print a good 8x10 with mine, and it is a 2.1 M pixel camera. It you need to manually resize it, use a good program ( I use Photoshop 4.0) to resize, increasing the resolution as you decrease the size. Keep in mind (in photoshop) if you increase the total pixels past the original amount, the program does a crummy job of inventing new ones, thus decreasing the quality of the pic!

 

[MuffD]

So say I took some pics at 1600x1200 and want to print them down to like a 5x7 or so, what resolution should I set it at?

Thanks for your help

 

[OS]

yes, increasing the dpi would immensely increase image quality, but the tradeoff is a smaller picture print. For the 3 megapixel guys, that's no big deal.

 

[moid]

For example:
When I have a photo in Photoshop:
When I select image size, I have a 24x16" image at 72 dpi. The total pixel size is 5.88 M.
I can change the image size to 7x5" , and bring the dpi up to 200 without increasing the total pixel size, it comes out to 4.39M.
I can change the image size to 12x8", and bring the dpi up to 140 with total pixel size at 5.4 M.
Just make sure you don't go over the total original pixels and you should be fine!