300 DPI VS 360 DPI - When to use with what printer?

I've read somewhere awhile ago that Epson printers prefer an image that has been scaled to 360 DPI, whereas other printers prefer 300 DPI. Is there any sense/truth/logic to this, or should I just have my images rezzed to 300 DPI no matter that brand of printer I have.

I'm probably going to start printing on my Canon Pixma Pro 9000 MkII printer. What DPI works best with this printer?

Unless this has changed, you are right about Epson being natively 360. If you size your image using 360 DPI, the printer software will not have to interpolate anything since you have already done it and, presuming, using better algorithms than what the printer manufacturer supplies.

At least you are in total control.

Here's an older test: http://www.ddisoftware​.com/qimage/quality/#q​uality

But I must say, I've never done any serious testing, since my prints look pretty good on my R2880 at whatever ppi the image happens to be in

The rule is 360 ppi for Epson, 300 for Canon and HP.

It's strange that this question be asked here now, because just a couple days ago I read something that left me a little perplexed. Printing from LR to an Epson R1900, I have always set the output resolution to 360 ppi, figuring that LR's resizing algorithm might be better than Epson's. This is, of course, purely conjecture unsupported by actual knowledge. However, in a thread on the Luminous Landscape forum - http://luminous-landscape.com …=379558&st=0&#e​ntry379558 - Jeff Schewe, who knows a thing or two about printing, wrote that his personal practice is to send the image at its native resolution, i.e. at whatever ppi that works out to according to the print size. What puzzles me is that he also writes that with very big images that he wants to nail at 720 ppi, he does write in that number. Which makes me wonder why the same logic doesn't apply to smaller files and 360 ppi. At any rate, I tried printing at the native res yesterday and the print looks great. Still, I should note that an image from my 5D2 at the size I normally print is 343 ppi, not so very different from 360, so the driver is doing only a 5% upsize. When I have a chance I will have to try it with a shot from the 40D.

Technically speaking, Epson printers want 720ppi input, but 360ppi is the closest realistic alternative. If you print via Qimage, it will automatically use it's own upsize & sharpening routine to send a 720ppi file to an Epson printer.

Even low end Epsons now do 1440

rothers wrote in post #10671787
Even low end Epsons now do 1440

That's dpi, not ppi.

Kolor-Pikker wrote in post #10671722
Technically speaking, Epson printers want 720ppi input, but 360ppi is the closest realistic alternative. If you print via Qimage, it will automatically use it's own upsize & sharpening routine to send a 720ppi file to an Epson printer.

360 is a good alternative because the resize 360 > 720 is a simple doubling which is an easy calculation that even an algorithm that is not the greatest in the world can do well. 240 ppi (240 > 720 = x3) can be very good also.

+1

To add....The Pro lab I use insists on 360 for 12 x 16 or smaller and 300 for larger prints (different printers). They told me the printers they use and the front end software does not do as a good a job of resizing as programs such as Photoshop.

René Damkot wrote in post #10671372
Here's an older test: http://www.ddisoftware​.com/qimage/quality/#q​uality

That test and another related one were supposed to convince me to use 600 rather than 300 ppi on my HP. I took the time to print all the test images and could not see the difference.

In that same thread that I linked above there is a question about Schewe's statement in his DVD "Camera to Print" that anything above 480 ppi will choke older drivers (like older than Epson
R7800).

I'd like to make 18" x 12" prints from my 7D image files.

Would it be better to resample the 7D images to 5400 x 3600 and 300 PPI in software such as PS which would let the printer have a native 300 PPI file for the print or let the printer do the resampling of the 5184 x 3456 image to get to 300 PPI for a 12" x 18" print?

The former. If you sharpen your images before printing, it would be best to do so on the resampled image before it goes to the printer. Will you see a difference. That I cannot tell you. I have always done the resampling/sharpening.​.. myself before sending it to a printer.

ChasP505 wrote in post #10672067
That test and another related one were supposed to convince me to use 600 rather than 300 ppi on my HP. I took the time to print all the test images and could not see the difference.

The way I understand the Qimage documentation (I use Qimage and very happy), there are two factors to consider for optimal resize.

One is the 720/600 ppi vs. 360/300 ppi resolution (depending on printer brand), the other is the accuracy of resizing. As I get it, Qimage interacts with the driver and resizes to the exact number of pixels required by the driver for the planned print size (internally translated to a specific dot-matrix size). If you do your own resize before printing, you can't set the exact number of pixels unless you determine the print size in 1/720" resp. 1/600" multiples (and not at all if you are printing borderless, where the amount of overspray is unknown). Therefore, if you do your own resize, you are bound to miss the exact number of pixels required by the driver and the driver does one more resize (using a simpler/faster algorithm to boot).

agedbriar wrote in post #10674867
The way I understand the Qimage documentation (I use Qimage and very happy), there are two factors to consider for optimal resize..

I've been using Qimage for about 3 years and it does a good job. I print about 50% of my photos from Photoshop, 50% with Qimage. My old HP printer has beautiful output at 300 ppii. 600 is too fine for it to handle.