Dijifi.com

[Maxine370]

So I saw an ad for this place in one of my local free papers and checked it out because I offer some of the same services (doing a much heavier focus on slideshows and video editing).

Anyway, I see that they charge differently for photo scanning standard reoltion of 300 dpi and full resolution 600 dpi. My understanding was despite scanning at a higher resolutio, you can never get higher than the original photo. in effect you just charged more to have a bigger file. Certainly for tv use there is not benefit to higher dpi, right?

I am just curious about this? Also how does slide and negative scanning work?

[Steve Grisetti]

Yes, for the most part, scanning at 600 dpi is probably a little excessive. And, as you say, you can't get higher resolution than the original -- but, since you're scanning from a photo, if it was shot was a good camera on good film, you can get a lot out of it.

But think of it this way: If you've got a 4x3 inch photo and you scan it at 300 dpi, you can print it out up to about 6x4-1/2 inches and still have acceptable quality. Scan it at 600 dpi, though, and you can blow it up to 12x9 inches! And, with some good Extensis software, you may even be able to pump that up enough to get a pretty good poster out of it!

But you're right, Beth. For use in video, there's little advantage to having that much resolution.

[John 'twosheds' McDonald]

I have some poster producing software (Poster7 from http://www.postersw.com).

When I am producing large posters (say 4 x 3 A4 pages) then I use a higher resolution for scanning photos - normally I go for 1200dpi which may be excessive but I only go that far for such large prints.

For my own photos that I have scanned for long term keeping I use 600dpi so that if I want to reprint them I get a good size/quality print.

When scanning negs or slides for long term storage I use the 1200 setting.

All of the above are for storing my personal stuff.

For video work I scan at whatever I think is appropriate (depending on source image size) and then standardise all of the scanned images destined for video down to about 1000 x 750dpi. If I know that I want to do a zoom in/pan then I might scan that particular image at a higher resolution just to accommodate the potential need for greater detail.