Scanning Tips

Scanning Tips: Scanning, Viewing and Printing

Ever wondered why the images you scan look much larger when you insert them into your email messages as attachments?

This is usually because you are scanning at a higher "pixels per inch" (ppi) setting than is displayed on your screen. Say, for example, that one inch on a ruler exactly equals one inch on your computer's screen. (I was suggesting to view a ruler from within a word processor or any other program with such a feature to illustrate this point.) We would say that your screen displays 72 pixels per inch, as there are 72 points in an inch and thus a 72-point typeface size would be about 1 inch high. Now, chances are your screen resolution probably isn't exactly 72 ppi (most PC users run at about 96 ppi on today's monitors by default), but for the sake of this discussion, let's pretend that it is. As you may know, you can change the screen resolution using the Display Control panel, so this is an easy thing to vary.
 
If you scanned an image at 72 pixels per inch, it would be displayed at the actual size on this 72 ppi screen -- truly, a "what you see is what you get" ("WYSIWYG") representation. Of course, it would not be very clear, as there aren't that many pixels on your screen, and it would look terrible when printed, as most printers are capable of much, much higher printed resolution - up to 2880 dots per inch.
 
So, to summarize, you are apparently scanning at a higher ppi value than that which the email program is displaying. As you cannot set the ppi value in any email program I've ever seen (independent of the screen resolution, that is), you have to make some decisions.

1. is the scanned image for on-screen viewing? If so, scan at 72 to 96 dpi (I usually use a value of 96), as this is the most common range of screen resolutions.
2. Do you want the file to print at high quality? If so, then keep doing what you are doing, and don't worry about the fact that it displays oversize in the email program. That's normal, for the resons discussed above. PhotoDeluxe, by default scans at 200 dpi, I believe, thus images are roughly twice the size they should be on the screen.
3. Do you want the best of both worlds? If so, consider the use of a format such as Adobe Acrobat PDF (Portable Document Format), which can produce "digital paper" output with images that can be zoomed for display or printing at will. You would save the scanned image as a PDF file and the recipient would use the free Acrobat reader to view and/or print the file. Many of today's scanning software packages and photo-manipulation tools are already capable of saving as PDF, so you might not need to buy anything.

A related topic, which I'll leave as an exercise for your further exploration, is the issue of how high the scanned resolution should be for optimal printed quality.