Digital BW, The Print

I'd like to do some experiments with the qimage demo to see if I like
it and could use some input. Since I use StudioPrint all I will do is
use it to process tiffs, then place them in the RIP. First of all, I
was told the x600 printers were native 720dpi, no? I thought qimage
reported back the printer native dpi, and it currently says 360x360
for my 9600.
Also, any advice you could give about the various scaling/sharpening
algorythms would be a help, I'd like to limit my experimenting time.
Basically, I'd just like to see if I can get better large prints from
smaller format files. Is this worth playing with for that, or are
normal Photoshop tools going to get me to pretty much the same place?
Thanks,
Tyler

PS- of course what I'm really trying to do is avoid reading the manual...