Printer Resolution and Stuff

With the exception of a few RIPs, the interpolation done in the printer driver is crude. You should send the file to the driver with the pixel pitch that the halftoner in the driver uses, not let the driver do the resampling.

Yes, that is true but I thought for the purposes of answering Alan's question it would have been over complicating the explanation of PPI he was querying.

Fwiw, yes I send images to my Epson Printer at 360 PPI for the paper size I want since 360PPI is my printer's native print resolution.

Here I need to disagree to some extent in so far as I think describing it as "crude" is a bit harsh.

I am not a scientist or an engineer but I accept that looking at prints under a microscope you very well might be able to see the difference in print quality if the printer driver did the interpolation to the printer's native print resolution.

But for all intents and purposes I think most "mum and dad" photographers will not be able to see any difference in print quality in their prints when viewed under their normal viewing conditions if the printer driver did the interpolation.

It doesn’t get much cruder than nearest neighbor.

"Crude" is a relative term.

As I said, I think most "mum and dad" photographers will not be able to see any difference in print quality in their prints when viewed under their normal viewing conditions if the printer driver did the interpolation.

Everyone is entitled to decide for themselves if the print quality of their prints is acceptable to them or not.

My vision is good for an old man, but not great. 20/15 in one eye, and 20/20 in the other. With a sharp, detailed file, the difference between NN and say, bi-cubic is obvious to me just holding a baryta print in my hands. I see no reason why a "mum and dad" photographer (whatever that means) should have impaired vision, so let's pas on that. It is possible that unskilled photographers make not be able to make sharp, detailed files. Is that your assumption? The other possibility is that the "M&D" photographer can see the difference and doesn't care. I suppose that's possible, though I see no evidence in favor of that argument. Or maybe the "M&D" photographer is printing on canvas.

But why not get it right from the get go, if you've gone to all the trouble of buying a printer, buying good paper, calibrating your monitor, making or choosing the right profile, etc? Checking the right box in Lr and entering the right number there takes very little effort compared to everything else about printing.

We, and anyone else who wanted to chip in, could very easily go on about this for days and turn this into another mega-thread.

The 2 choices for where to do the interpolation comes down to user preference depending on their needs and acceptable print quality threshold. As long as the user makes an informed decision and they are happy with the print quality, that is all that matters.

To make one, they need to know that

Of course. We already established that so I'm not sure why you repeating that.

As I said though, at the end of the day it is up to the user to decide for themselves if the print quality of the print after the printer driver did the interpolation is good enough for them.

What is crude for you and Jim might still be acceptable to some. It is their choice to make.

Did someone mention BIG print . 6 meg file Pentax K7 . look at 300 mm distance detail was amazing.

Was the interpolation to the native printer resolution done by the printer driver or manually in the printing app or some other 3rd party app?

Very often I can get away with 200PPI for the paper size and still make very acceptable prints.

I can remember it took about 30 min to get the image ready for printing. i think it was the printer software that prepared the image.

Many times the "crude" driver interpolation is more than good enough for me as well, especially when ppi for the paper size is reasonably close to 360 ppi, the printer's native print resolution.

It's when the ppi for the paper size is well below 200ppi that I would definitely use one of the modern AI driven upsizing apps to resize the image to 360ppi for the paper size.

Hi Alan,
whats the longevity of the epson dye ink printers. im looking at the et-8550 for cost effective printing .

There is big difference in longevity between different storage conditions!
www.wilhelm-research.com/epson/WIR_Epson_SureColor_P7570_and_P9570_Printers_2023_01_25.pdf

Thanks Al i had a read of that. i might go for the epson always nice to have a different printer to play with.