Well....to clarify....your image was 72 pixels per inch. The whole issue can be quite complex depending on the printing process. I will use ink jet as an example 'cause it is the easiest to understand. Example: my ink jet printer prints at 1440x720 dots per inch. If I print an image which is dimensioned to be, say, 150 pixels per inch, the extra "resolution" of my printer is not wasted since many dots are used to make a pixel. You can see this from the fact that the printer has only 3 colours and black...so, to make the rest of the colour spectrum, it mixes a varying amount of dots of the colours it has to make the actual colour of the pixel. So, the higher the resolution of the printer, the smoother the colour tones will be. Now, for the picky people out there, I fudged the above explanation a bit because there is a different dot size and resolution in ink jet technology, but the basic idea still holds. Well, back to your question, having your image at 300 ppi is actually usually excessive (but dependent on the print technology). If you had a hypothetical printer with dye for every colour in the spectrum (i.e. it would be able to print every pixel directly the colour it was supposed to be...no mixing), you would not be able to see the pixels at 200 ppi unless you stuck your nose right up to the paper. For example I printed a 3600x2700 image at 32" x 24". This is only 112.5ppi! But, by advantage of ink jet technology (plus the printer was 600x600 dpi) and the diffusion pattern of the dots, the pixels were blended to a degree that the made the division between them invisible. Ideally, I would have printed at about 150 ppi. Conclusion: don't know if anything above made any sense, but, 72 ppi is too low, but 300 dpi is also probably too much. While it is dependent on your print process, I would go for between 150 and 200 ppi. 300 shouldn't hurt, but if it means an extra day of rendering, it's probably not worth it. phew.... -karl