Digital BW, The Print

The newer Epson desktop printers, probably 1280 or later, are native 720
dpi, but the Epson X600 wide format printers are native 360. I think I read
this in a FAQ somewhere on the Qimage homepage, but I can't find it now. I
like the fact that Qimage can apply "smart sharpening" after the
interpolation to 720 dpi, which is not something I'd want to do in Photoshop
because of the file size. Qimage's advantage is less important for the wide
format printers since 360 dpi is not too much different from the resolution
of my original file.

In my tests I could detect a slight improvement in detail when using Qimage
to up-sample and then smart sharpen, but only with images that really had
very sharp detail. 

Regarding interpolation methods, here are three links which you may have
already seen. 

http://www.ddisoftware.com/qimage/quality/
http://www.steves-digicams.com/techcorner/January_2005.html
http://www.ddisoftware.com/testpics/resample.jpg

Steve

-----Original Message-----
From: DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com
[mailto:DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Tyler
Boley
Sent: Saturday, October 22, 2005 3:20 PM
To: DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [Digital BW] qimage advice?

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...