Magazine picture resolution

[alfie jones]

What resolution are the pictures published in magazines? Is there a minimum dpi so they appear as perfect images?

[chrisbailey]

On screen media is 72dpi. For nice quality print images it's usually 300dpi, or 600dpi, although some printers can do over 1000dpi. Anything from 600dpi and above looks really good in print.

[gen2]

When I enquired a few years ago, the minimum resolution for reproduction within a magazine was 300dpi and for the featured high quality glossy pages (and cover) it was twice that. I don't know if that is still the case.  The magazine in question is no longer published - maybe they weren't good enough!

[Thunderchild]

well i work in a printers and the actual resolution at which the print is made is not realy that high. for graphical manipulation purpose 300 dpi should be fine (think that is 12 dots of any colour in 1mm and 144 dots in 1 sqr mm) but when fit actually comes to printing things r a bit different. printing is generally done in the four main colours that r also used in pc printers: cyan magenta yellow and black. these colours can not be shaded: to obtain a shade the ratio of printed and unprinted dots is varied. for example it i want to use black to print grey (assuming this gray is 50 % of black) the on the plate if the resolution is say 100 dpi the 50 will be black and 50 will be left white. these dots r usually small enough not to be seen by the naked eye but a siple magnifying glass is enoough to make a seemingly very well defined picture a mass of different coloured dots it is actually and optical illusion our eyes fuse all the dots together. by definition we cannot distinguish more than 3 dots per mm (75 dpi) at one meters distance so i would say that 300 dpi is sufficient however the number of dots is actually the resolution as it is like considering every 9 sqr dots (3*3) as one dot that can have a shade varing from 0 to 100 % of that colour that with the varing dot % of other colours make up the different coliurs. sorry if this sounds very confusing but no one taught me this i have learned it from personal expirience working on and offset press (the most common type of printing press that exists in different forms according to the job) in any case if u want to verify what i am saying look at a print with as powerful a magnifying glass as u can or do as high a resolution scan as u can and then zoom in as far as u can an u will what i mean.

[Thunderchild]

ps i did some checking up at work and the resolution we print at is 2400 dpi so i should think that it is like 240/300 dpi is the image sense to computers remembering that a dot on the computer is any clour and shade in one dot whereas on print matter it is just dots of four colours and they are always the same density (well depends on the guy doing the job hehe i've seen some terrible jobs) so different shades a aceived by the number of dots versus blanks like i said before