NikonD70 NEF -> Capture -> Epson R800 on A4. Resize?

Good morning,

if I want to use the max. printable area on A4 I have 2 (at least)

alternatives: I can set the appropriate image size at 300 DPI in Capture and

tell the printers driver to use the actual image size, or I can leave the image

in its original size and tell the printer to fill the page. I have tried both

ways and cannot actually say which is better (I must say I am rather new to

printing and I may not be able to see the difference). It is my understanding

that if I set the best photo quality in the printer driver, the actual printing

resolution will be greater than 300 DPI, so in either case there should be some

interpolation work at the printing stage, if this is true, is it better to

leave all the interpolation work to the printer driver or to do the first step

in Capture? What do the experts say? Thank you, Marco

Your confusing, as many do, the terms DPI and PPI. When you're looking at an image on your monitor in capture, your talking about PPI-pixels per inch. DPI-dots per inch-refers to your printing resolution. Your R800 will go up to 5760 by 1440 dots per inch with interpolation. I think it 2880 by 1440 native. My personal opinion would be to remain in control of my image rather than let the print software decide for me, so if I want a 5 by 7 image, I'll make it so in PS or Capture and print it's real size.

Thank you Paul.

You are right, I misused the term DPI, and I am still confused. Say I take a shot with my D70, in Capture I see it's 25,47 x 16,93 cm at 300 PPI. The epson R800 printable area is 29,1 cm on the long side, so I can set it in capture: 29,1 x 19,35 cm still at 300 ppi, capture informs me the image is being scaled 114,3 %, that's interpolation am I correct? When I print on the Epson at 5760 x 1440 DPI in real size what happens? Is there another stage of conversion/interpolation? If so, my image has gone through two calculations, I was wondering if there could be any advantage in letting the printer driver do it all at once. Maybe only one process is better than two. I have done a quick test and I can't see a difference, but as I said I am quite new to printing and maybe my eye is not well "educated" yet. Thank you, Marco

The Epson print driver up-res's images to 720 dpi. On some subjects, particularly those with fine dark lines on a light background and vice versa you will see jagged lines if you send a 300 dpi image to the printer. You can avoid these by resizing the document in Photoshop yourself to 720dpi and sending to the printer telling it to print actual size. Alternatively you can use Qimage to do this for you.

Marco,

 

I don't believe that Kim is right, but people smarter than me will no doubt chime in. I've never printed from Capture, always from PS but let me take you through this and hopefully it will help (I'm going to round numbers)

 

Your D70s sensor is 3000 pixels by 2000 pixels. If an image is 300PPI it will be 10 inches (sorry, I'm in USA and we aren't fully metric yet) by 6.7 inches. When you print it, the Epson driver will offer you a choice of print resolutions. This is DPI. Some of the older print driver actually listed the choices by resolution such as 720 by 720 dpi, 1440 dpi etc. Now they just use silly term like photo, best photo, photo rpm.

 

For quality viewing most people like images to be somewhere from 240-360 PPI. Printing resolution will vary by print size. If you're printing a 6 by 4 inch print, you won't be able to tell much difference between Photo and Photo RPM.

 

Now if you want to make a print larger than the native size of your image (10 by 6.7 inches in your case) something wil have to change. You'll either have to lower your resolution-at 240 PPI your image would be 12.5 inches by 8.3 inches-or "up-res" your image using software interpolation such as the bicubic algorithms in Photoshop.

 

Hope this helps. Feel free to e-mail me with more questions.

 

Paul