Most people have a printer in their homes, or at the very least, in their office building at work. Some companies make their money from printing things for other people. If you have ever been involved in buying a printer you may have heard the term DPI being bandied about as if everyone knew exactly what was meant by it. If you did not, after reading this article you will.
DPI stands for dots per inch. It is basically how many tiny little dots of colour printers will place in a line of paper an inch long or whatever you happen to be printing on. This is not restricted to either vertical or horizontal but it refers to both. All printers that have a DPI of 2000 will place 2000 dots per inch of paper in both the vertical and horizontal fields. This means that in a square inch of paper you will have 4000,000 dots of ink.
It is often mistakenly used as an indication of how good the quality of a print, photos for example, are. It is actually an indication of how good the printers are. The higher the DPI the higher quality print the printer will produce.
The DPI of printers is a fixed characteristic of the printer. It does not change according to the size of the page or the amount of ink that you have available for the printer to use.
On the topic of ink, you should be aware that a printer with a higher DPI may use more ink than a printer with a low DPI. This is because the better quality printer will use more ink to print a high resolution picture than a lower quality printer. Of course, the quality of the printer will show in the printing of a high resolution picture because of the DPI.
One thing that you do need to check when you are printing a picture is that the DPI of the printer must be larger than the pixels per inch of the picture you want to print. If the picture has a greater resolution than the printer is able to handle the picture will come out looking grainy and will basically be of a poor quality.
The DPI of a printer and the pixel resolution of a picture are actually very similar. While dots per inch refers to the actual number of dots found on an inch of paper the pixels per inch refers to the digital representation of the same thing.
If you are going to be printing photos and posters, or anything that may be blown up to large sizes, you will need a very high quality printer with a large DPI rating. On the other hand, if you are just going to be printing documents and the occasional picture a lower DPI will be more than sufficient for your needs.
The DPI of a printer is not the be all and end all although it is important. You also should look at the speed of the printer and how many other settings you can change before deciding what printer will be the best for you.
About the AuthorFor more information about printers visit the website http://www.konicaminoltacentral.co.za
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