Nikon COOLPIX 5000 Instruction Manual - Page 76

Where Do I Go from Here?-How Do I Make Prints? How Do I Make Prints? From Data to Paper Digital photographs can be printed in a variety of ways. Many photofinishers now take delivery of image files on CompactFlash™ memory cards or on disk. Some photofinishing systems and personal photo printers also comply with Digital Print Order Format (DPOF), allowing you to print pictures from digital "print orders" that are stored on the camera memory card. If you have a suitable printer, you can also print pictures at home using Nikon View 4. Many newer color printers for the home market offer near photo-quality prints at an affordable price. This section describes how to take pictures for printing and outlines some of the options available for getting prints. Taking Pictures for Printing Image size and, to a lesser extent, quality, are important considerations when taking pictures for printing. Image size determines the maximum size at which the picture can be printed. If a small picture is printed at a large size, the individual dots that make up the photo (pixels) will be visible to the naked eye, giving the picture a rough, uneven appearance. Many household ink-jet printers have a target resolution for printing color images of around 300 dots per inch. At this resolution, a VGA photograph 640 × 480 pixels in size will print at a size of roughly 5.5 × 4 cm (2.1˝ × 1.6˝), while a full-size image will print at about 21.5 × 16 cm (8.5˝ × 6.4˝). The higher the image quality and size, the better the results when the picture is printed, particularly at larger print sizes. We recommend that you set image quality to FINE or NORMAL and image size to SXGA, UXGA, 3 : 2, or FULL when taking images that you intend to print at a later date (an image size of 3 : 2 will produce prints of the same proportions as prints made from 35-mm film). Taking Photographs for Editing and Enlarging With its 2,560 × 1,920 recording pixels, your Nikon digital camera can capture fine details, particularly at an image quality of HI and sizes of FULL or 3 : 2. Because HI-quality images require large amounts of memory, however (see figure on page 66), only a few such images can be stored on a memory card. We recommend that you use this setting when taking photographs that will later be edited in an imaging application or printed at an enlarged size. 62