what is meant by dpi in printers?

Answer 1

Okay, ask an excellent question and get a long winded answer! DPI stands for Dots Per Inch. In the old days (ten years ago) commercial printer's used special screens to break a photograph down to a series of dots to create tonal variations. Printing ink was black, and black ink is not good at showing subtle tone you see in any photo. To get around this problem, the special screen would produce large almost overlapping dots for dark areas, and small widely spaced dots for lighter areas. Each tone between dark and light was represented by different sized dots. Newspapers used between 13 and 18 variations of tone, whilst high quality magazines used around 21-25. Newspapers printed photos at around 72 -80 dots per inch and higher quality publications like Playboy magazine used 150 DPI.

Modern scanners and digital cameras can reproduce at 300-600 or even 1,200 DPI, but this is ridiculous. A modern LCD computer screen displays pictures at 72 - 96 DPI, so viewing a 1,200 DPI photo on a computer screen is stupid to say the least. If you use nice glossy paper in your printer, photos at 100 DPI will look as good as photos printed at much higher figures. Why, because the human eye can't comprehend the higher resolutions. So why do cameras and scanners do such high resolutions? So that you can crop a section and still see the detail! There is no other reason. If you're sending pic to friends by email, make them 72 DPI unless the friend want's to make prints. If that's the case, make them 100 DPI. Anything more just wastes bandwidth. A great free program for controlling the DPI of any photo is Irfanview, http://www.irfanview.com/ Open the pick, got to Image/Resample and change the current DPI to 100 and see if you can pick the difference. The file size will be around 100kb compared to the original 1 to 3 meg!

Answer 2

Dots per inch, it is the resolution of the printer. A higher DPI means better quality prints

Answer 3

dots per inch - printers put down tiny specks of ink to form images. These specks of ink are measured in dots per inch. The higher the dpi, the better the resolution of the printers output.

If you go back to the old days of dot matrix printers you would see where this come from. With the old dot matrix printers you could see the dots, today they are so small it's impossible without magnification.

Answer 4

DPI is dots per square inch.
Older dot matrix 9 pin printers printed pretty low, the Okidata microline 320 Turbo was 216dpi.
The old HP laserjet III was 300 DPI.
The old HP Deskjet 500 inkjet was 300dpi
The quality on dot matrix hasn't moved much, on laser and inkjet it has moved up and up and 2400 dpi is very common in low priced machines.
TSHO

Answer 5

DPI means dots per square inch. The higher the number the better the picture. If you have a low number the dots are more spread apart and make the picture look bad.

Answer 6

Hello. dpi in a printer means how many Dots Per Inch it can print. DPI=Dots per inch:)

Answer 7

DPI = dots per inch
It's how many tiny drops of ink it can place in a line without overlapping. The more you have the better the image you can print so long as your original image has at least the same resolution.

Answer 8

Dots Per Inch. The more DPI the better quality the print, of course you use more ink and the print speed is reduced.

Answer 9

Dots Per Inch

Answer 10

DPI= dots per inch