vB Easy Archive - Any way to increase photo dpi in 8525?

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Any way to increase photo dpi in 8525?
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Posted by: struff

My old phone is 1.3 MP and takes pics at 300 dpi. The 8525 is 2 MP but only takes pics at 96 dpi. Is there a way to increase that somehow?

Thanks.

Posted by: aaronb532

Don't worry about it because unless you are printing it doesn't matter. It won't display on the screen any different. It's not saving at a lower quality because of it.

With a 2MP camera you are still getting 1600x1200 resolution whether the dpi is 1 or a million.

Posted by: msatlas

Are you using photoshop?

If so, pull up the image size dialog, change the dpi under print settings to 300, and then change the image size back to 1600x1200 (changing the dpi will change the resolution of the picture) before you click OK.

As aaronb532 said, this will not affect how the image gets displayed on any screens, just how it prints.

Posted by: struff

Well, yeah, I do print pics and frame 'em if they're good.

I don't use Photoshop (it does way too many things that I don't need to do). I'll check my photo software and see if I can do that with it. If I can, what kind of numbers should I be using for dpi? Is there such thing as setting it too high? As you can probably tell, I am clueless in this respect.

Thanks.

Posted by: msatlas

Well this is getting kind of off topic and more general digital photography stuff, but hey whatever.

Any digital image has a resolution. So for example a 2 megapixel cameraphone pic is 1600x1200 pixels. Depending on how many pixels your particular display has and how large those pixels are physically sized, the size of your image will vary.

When it comes to putting the image on paper, there are no 'pixels' per se on the paper, and printers can make teeny tiny dots that are much smaller than the pixels on any normal monitor. So your dpi setting tells your printer how many dots (pixels) in the digital world correspond to 1 inch on the paper.

So you take that 1600 x 1200 pixel digital image, and print it at 200 dpi. You get an image on the paper that measures 8 x 6 inches. Change the resolution to 400 dpi and you get 4 x 3 inches on the paper.

Now, resolution does not absolutely determine image quality, so for a given resolution, the lower quality your camera is the higher dpi you will want to print at (i.e. smaller image on the paper) and the harder it is to spot the imperfections in the image.

For real good quality source images you can stick to 200 dpi and will get great results. For junky cameraphone pictures you probably would want more like 350+ dpi. Heck I personally would not print and frame anything from a camera phone, but as you can probably tell I'm a bit of a photography geek and thus for the most part I've usually got a better option than my phone for taking pictures.

Posted by: struff

Thanks. That is helpful. While I don't make a habit of printing pics I take with my phones, I have printed some beauties that I caught on my old phone before (it takes really good shots in good daylight).