I've already written about understanding the screen resolution and its settings for windows and what the pixels mean. The measurement of monitor, scanner an d digital imaging resolution is PPI, that means Pixels Per Inchi. The measurement of printed resolution is DPI, it means Dots Per Inch - the rule remains the same: the quality and the size of the printed medium depends of the number of the dots per inch. For the current every day usage and the draft printing there are used lower resolution settings as 150 or 300 DPI. High resolution settings start ar 600 DPI.
DPI is used instead PPI because the printers use tiny dots of ink to produce a printed image. As you easily can understand, a printer capable of 1200x1600 DPI can produce higher resolution than a printer that prints a file at 800x600 DPI.
You should understand that large amount of data measured in mega pixels (big images, with great PPI) will create large files on hard disks and they will consume a lot of memory when you'll print them. The printed result will be larger, depending of the size of the image, but if you want to keep the quality of the image you should use high resolution for printer (at least 600 DPI, but the minimum should be 300 DPI).
