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I'll try some photoshop techniques tonight; anyone have any other suggestions?

DM

The pictures in NTS Care 72dpi & ~720x480. Low res to begin with. You can scale it up but it won't look like a 3000x3000 picture no matter what. :)

I took a picture from my timeline & put it on a DVD. It looked OK to me.

The biggest thing to keep in mind to print size and quality is resolution- dimensions are something completly different. Dimensions are the physical size x-amount of pixels wide by x-amount of pixels tall. Resolution is also known as DPI or PPI....(dots/pixels per inch) this is the attribute which has the largest direct effect on the printed outcome. You can have a 720x480 image print out HUGE...if the dpi is low....likewise you can have 3000x1900 print out tiny if the dpi is really high.

As you know the default dpi for webgraphics, etc is 72 dpi...very far from print standard. If you print an image at 72 dpi you'll most definitly see aliasing from a digital image. You can however have an image with small dimensions print large this way. They say 300dpi is print standard but you can get away with 150 and have good results.

You obviously want to start out with the largest dimensions as possible. Beings 720x480 is quite small you'll have to do tweaking of the DPI to get the image to the right size. You can open the Image>Size dialog in photoshop. Make sure the resample checkbox isnt checked and start tweaking the dpi to get the right size you need.

Another thing you can try is using an upscaling program like Genuine Fractals- this program has a very efficient interpolating algorithm to upsize your images with lower dimensions sizes to something much larger to print at a good size @ 300dpi or beyond.

One note if you ever decide to use the R200's CD/DVD printer software. Avoid using the blur settings which blur the edges of the DVD. The program is forced to use some of their own compression which is very inefficient and causes som aliasing in fine text.

Would somebody please take DPI down to the back paddock and put the thing out of its misery. For anyone working in video it must be the most useless concept I've come across. It's equally useless in photography. All that matters is how many pixels you have, the whole inches bit is only relevant in printing.
I've had the most inane conversation with hi end graphics people when I went to get negs scanned. I asked how higher a res they could do the scans at, they said A0. What the hell has a paper size got to do with scanning a neg, I wanted to know what the resolution would be. So after much mental arithemetic, which they only agreed to after I explained the concept to them, I worked out they meant if it was enlarged at 300dpi the size would be A0!
I don't know how web graphics can be 72 dpi, 72 pixels per inch of what? If I view them on a 7" monitor or a 19" monitor? Or maybe if I scan them, well it almost makes sense then except what size image am I scanning, scan a 35mm neg at 72 dpi and it'll look pretty sad but print it out 8x10 and scan at 72dpi and it'd be pretty good, file size and download time would be a lot different though.
Now before a few people jump to DPIs defence I know he's big time in the printing business but that's a whole different world, there they're talking about the resolution of their process, not the quality of the image being printed but how it's being printed.
In the case in point the image has started out as 720x480, printing it using anymore dots than that isn't going to make it any better. What will help is how its interpolated to match the printers resolution.

That's my rant for the night over.

Bob.