One of the dirty little secrets about 300dpi print quality is
that it rarely exists in real life.
Do this:
In photoshop (or whatever editor of your choice, make a 1 pixel
wide line seperated by a 1 pixel wide white for an entire inch.
Make one inch squares of this in black, cyan, yellow, magenta,
red, green and blue. Make one square with red and green instead
of white. (you can assign a 1pixel by 1space pattern to your
paint brush) Have all of these blocks on a single "5x7 print"
Send to your own printer as well as the commercial lab.
Can you see the lines in the final print? What do they look
like? How many inches away from the print do you have to place
your nose? Do the lines even exist or did they merge together?
Print at different DPI settings to see where the difference is
visible.
Interpolate to 150% and print. Compare.
At even what we think are close viewing distances, 300dpi (or
400 in the case of your lab) might be what the defined pixel
square is, but the physical technology has a hard time actually
delivering clear defined lines visible to the naked eye.
300 to 400dpi sounds nice in theory, but in reality it may not
be necessary.
How a printer and paper deals with dot-spread is more of an
issue than image-file resolution being sent to it.
Chances are, 225-250 dpi is about the limit of the unaided eye.
AG
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