Recommended ppi for scanning photos?

Kamran

Hi all,

I've got a new all-in-one scanner printer and am going through the laborious process of scanning all those old photos in. However, in the settings it gives me the option to choose the resolution in ppi, which is the recommended value generally?

Some sites say 300 and some say 600? I've tried both and although I can tell the difference, they're quite similar?

thanks!

aliEnRIK

id say 600 (or even 1200 if thats possible)

Browntoa

depends if you want to enlarge them later on , I do all mine at 1200

Sput2001

It really depends what you're planning to do with them.

For same-size printing, 300dpi is usually OK. For web use, 72dpi is fine.

Bear in mind that you reduce a resolution after scanning, but increasing it is a different ball-game altogether, so it's better to go higher than lower.

Resolutions like 1200dpi are going to give you pretty hefty file sizes, mind.

nomoneytoday

I would go as high as your storage and ram allows if you want to do work with the images. If they are for websites or printing pdfs then 72/300 are ok

bob_a_builder

or you could refer to this

http://www.scantips.com/

isofa

If you are scanning photos rather than negs with a dedicated slide scanner, then anything more than 600dpi will be a waste, unless you plan to really enlarge the images, but there will be noise picked up from the print, so it won't be worthwhile.

It's very unlikely that an all-in-one scanner will be worth using at it's top resolution anyway.

Further more, if you are saving as a JPEG files, then you are immediately losing image data and quality, so I'd argue there is little point, in going to the highest resolution, only to save in a poorer format. Only if you intent to save as TIFF files (which will be fairly large), or another lossless format, will it really be worth ramping up the resolution.

If you are looking at storing for the future, and maybe printing 1 to 1.25 larger, then 300dpi will be fine, if you have the time and the room, opt for 600dpi, perhaps saving a second version at 72dpi for a quick preview.