What is "Dpi"?

What is "Dpi"?

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DPI stands for dots per inch. Anybody who's been involved in printing and graphic design may be familiar with this term completely outside the idea of computers, but it has to do with how detailed the resolution is of the image that you're looking at. This is actually one of the most confusing things for people to get a grasp of when they're dealing with basic, basic digital photography. If you're posting images online; if you're just sending an email with a photograph and somebody is just going to look at it onscreen, then 72 DPI is typically what you'd use, if this image is going to be displayed on a webpage or just sent to look at onscreen. That image is going to look great onscreen, but if you try to print it out it may not look very good. Then, you're going to want to kick it up to something like 300 DPI, which becomes more appropriate for printing a basic image. If you're going to do big, big, high resolution blow-ups of something, or real photographic quality prints then you can go up to 600 DPI or 2400 DPI. You can really go even higher and higher in terms of that detail and resolution. The more DPI you have, the more resources and more memory that takes to contain the image, but the more quality you're going to get out of it. The higher the DPI and the bigger the image, the longer it's going to take to transmit, the longer it's going to take to print, the longer it's going to take to work with, and the better it's going to be.