What's A Good Scanner Dpi For High Quality Scans?

[Lisanne]

I'm looking to get a new printer, and I plan on getting an all-in-one. I've been eyeing up the Canon PIXMA's after reading the newsletter with the interview from Ro, and the one's I'm looking at from Amazon are getting good reviews. After much consideration I am down to the selling point being the scanner. I plan on doing a lot of old picture scanning, and I may try scanning 3D objects for LO's in the future. What dpi produces professional results for this?

 

My scanner right now is so bad that i end up doing more fixing from the scan than the actual picture.

[DiannaC]

Well, to get good quality prints, the standard is 300 dpi. The problem with old pictures is that often they are too small and people will want to scan them to blow them up and they don't realize that dpi means "dots per INCH" (or pixels per inch). So you need to scan at a higher dpi if you plan to enlarge. With old pictures I often scan at 1200-1600 dpi which is probably overkill but it insures that I have a lot of wiggle room if I want to enlarge them. You can also scan, on some scanners, at 1200-1600 dpi at 200%. You end up scanning the picture twice the size with the picture being quite a few Megabytes but there are lots of pixels available to make any kind of repair, to blow up to another size, etc. That's what I do anyway. Most Scanners these days can handle those numbers. I hope that helps.