Quote:
Originally Posted by brothertheo
... you can't print 2400 individual pixels per inch - the printer instead takes your 100/300/xxx dpi image and then internally creates a dot pattern of whatever colors the printer uses, much like the halftone color pattern in the newspaper.
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Being an old newspaper photographer Brothertheo's explanation makes perfect sense. Just a few years back I would photograph a news event, develop film and enlarge a print using a dot-screen (normally about 80 dots per square inch for newsprint, 120 dpi for glossy magazines). The presses would interpret the dots and allocate ink to the paper much like our inkjet printers spray (Just take a good lope to an inkjet print and you can still see the dots). An average newspaper press would give you muddy looking prints in the newspaper if you exceeded its dots-per-inch ability (e.g. 80 dpi).
Since Adobe was trying to crash into the publishing industry with Adobe Pagemaker and later Photoshop, Abode choose to stick with lingo newspaper and publishers were comfortable with - thus DPI (which is a print-based measurement) was incorrectly adopted over PPI (which is a monitor-based measurement).
Now for the fun part: Some 8.5x11" prints look better when printed at 200 dpi rather than the high 300 dpi or 600 dpi because of the dot-per-inch spray capabilities of the individual inkjet printer. The photographer sometimes has a camera which exceeds what his printer needs to provide excellent prints.