[itsPatAmerican]

If one of these documents was scanned at 1200dpi and down sampled to 72dpi and the other was just scanned at 72 dpi how would the letters of the different documents compare?

[pissant]

Welcome to FR, BTW

[Polarik]

If one of these documents was scanned at 1200dpi and down sampled to 72dpi and the other was just scanned at 72 dpi how would the letters of the different documents compare? First of all, DPI only matters when it comes to print time. Secondly, JPG compression is the most important factor in determining how closely does the image display match the original document. A complete COLB is laser-printed on an 8 1/2" x 11" or, a standard sized sheet of paper. a 1200DPI scan of it would produce a 2" square printable image, but a four-fold increase in file size. Not exactly what you would do if you were emailing it or posting it online. Changing the resolution to 72 DPI would increase the print size to about 34" by 33." BUT, both the 1200 and the 72 would look exactly the same on your computer screen because all images are scaled to 72 or 96 DPI to match the resolution of most monitors. Everyone can test this out w/o printing the image. First, view it at your monitors highest resolution (let's say 1024 x 768), and then change the computer display to 640 x 480. What happens to your image? Well, it appears to grow in size, and you see less of the image simply because you have fewer pixels on which to display it. Don't confuse total pixel counts with dots per inch -- they are different aspects, but are interrelated.