Digital photography - image resolution?

Question

My camera captures all images at the resolution of 72 dpi. I can't figure out what to do to capture images at 300 dpi. Please help.

Answer 1

You can not control the pixels per inch in your camera, as this is a function of the sensor. I have found the following ppi for SOME cameras by the following manufacturers. I wonder if this specification is available anywhere. I have four camera manuals in front of me and I can't find it in any of them.

NIKON - 300 ppi
CANON - 180 ppi
PENTAX - 72 ppi

We "discussed" this by way of question and answers a while back and decided that the ppi file produced by the camera really did not have any effect on the capability to produce a good print. If I take a photo with my wife's 6 MP Nikon and view the image on the screen, it will start out as 300 ppi. If it's a full frame image of 3008 pixels x 2000 pixels, the SCREEN image would be pretty big if I viewed it full sized, but it would print 10.0" x 6.6". If you crop a 5x7 out of this, keeping it as full-frame as possible, it becomes 400 dpi.

With my brother's 6 MP Pentax, the image is 2816 px x 2112 px, but it's at 72 ppi. If you print this without cropping, it would be 39" x 29"!!! If you crop a 5x7 out of this, though, it becomes 402 dpi resolution, which is virtually identical for the Nikon 6 MP camera.

With my son's 6 MP Canon Powershot A620, the image is 3072 px x 2304 px, but it's at 180 ppi. If you could possibly print this without cropping, it would be 17.1" x 12.8". If you crop a 5x7 out of this, though, it becomes 439 dpi resolution, which is a bit better than either of the other 6 MP cameras.

In other words, regardless of the sensor's pixel-per-inch output, 6 MP cameras produced the same resolution when it came time to print comparable images. How about a camera with more pixels?

If I take a photo with my 10 MP Nikon D200 and view the image on the screen, it will start out as 300 ppi. If it's a full frame image of 3872 pixels x 2592 pixels, the SCREEN image would be pretty big if I viewed it full sized, but it would print 12.9" x 8.6", if I had the right paper. If you crop a 5x7 out of this, keeping it as full-frame as possible, it becomes 516 dpi, or higher resolution than the 6 MP cameras. We knew that is would work out like this, though, didn't we?

The REAL question is, what difference does this make in the real world? If we agree that 300 dpi is an excellent resolution for prints, as long as you end up with at least 300 ppi after you are done cropping on the screen, you will get an excellent print as far as resolution goes. All four cameras exceed that amount. I usually resize "down" to 300 dpi before printing, because you can't tell the difference above that resolution anyway. Most people would be quite happy with a 200 dpi print, so go ahead and crop a bit. If you get a print resolution too much below 200 dpi, you will start to see digital artifact in the print and it will be objectionable.

Answer 2

Some cameras have settings you can select for image quality (and file size). For example, my little 2mpx camera lets me select standard quality, high quality and super high quality/tiff when I am shooting photos. The Tiff option creates a much higher resolution image file, and it takes up much more memory on the flash card. The actual images from the camera are huge at 72 dpi (11x17 inches or so) but when printed as normal size photo prints, they look fine because the resolution gets higher when you make the image print smaller.

Answer 3

There should be a menu at the top or back of the digital camera that allows you to set the settings. Suggest you take out the menu again and just not only for this function but the rest as well You will be surprise what other things it can do. Organize and edit your images with picasa downloadable software. excellent companion for any levels of digital photographers. Make life much easier. To resize photos....and other things check out http://www.geocities.com/lcming/Digitalphotography

Answer 4

The file size is the only thing to worry about! Check your instruction book on how to capture images with the largest file size for the highest quality images. The images are converted to 300 dpi in the final step before printing. The images have to be stretched larger if the file size is too small, or reduced if the file size is larger than needed.
How many pieces try to cut a pizza into when you are trying to feed a lot of people is much less important than the size of the pizza itself.

Answer 5

Positive film offers a fairly large lattitude for exposure, transparency film (slides) does not. Digital, not shot RAW, has the same small lattitude as transparency film.

Answer 6

1) What kind of camera?
2) What resolution (in megapixels) are you shooting at?
3) How do you figure you're shooting in dots per inch? That's printer/scanner stuff.