Contrary to popular belief it is not necessary to print photographs at your printers maximum resolution. Modern inkjet printers are capable of printing at thousands of pixels per inch. You may need to use this resolution to print minutely detailed engineering drawings but for photographs the ideal resolution to use is 300 dpi.

This is because our eyesight can not really take advantage of anything over this value and if you do crank up the resolution there is a tendency to swamp the print head, creating poor quality prints and even unwanted artifacts in the image.

To do this you really need to decide what size you want to print before you take the photograph.

For example to print a 6 x 4 photo at 300 dpi the image should be 1200 x 1600, surprisingly only a 2 megapixel image……

3 megapixel should be used for 5 x 7 and 8 megapixel for A4.

This technique has the added bonus of using less ink.