Is this file big enough to print at 8.5 x 12?

I don't believe so. At 8.5"x12", the image is only 100DPI. For printing out a clear copy, you need it to be 300DPI.

What you have will print OK, but the quality won't be the same as a printed piece. You will probably see some pixelization.
 
288DPI is magazine print quality. 200DPI is newspaper print quality. You'd be looking at half of newspaper print quality. It wouldn't be a train wreck but it wouldn't be super nice.
 
That was the best I could find online. Guess I'll just grab a real one.

Edit: Or maybe I'll go down to Home Depot and have Jorge re-draw it for me?
 
Yeah, go for it - should look great.

Sure, From across the room. As said before, 300 DPI is standard for quality printing. You are looking at 1/3 of that, so you will see some pixelation, mostly in the background gradients. The majority of that file is solid blocks of color, that should render fine.
 
288DPI is magazine print quality. 200DPI is newspaper print quality. You'd be looking at half of newspaper print quality. It wouldn't be a train wreck but it wouldn't be super nice.

It depends upon how he will have it printed. A bubble jet printer does not print the same way an offset press does. Actually, for magazines and newsprint, they don't go by DPI but by instead by LPI. A typical newspaper uses 85LPI (a course screen), a quality grayscale ad slick used 133LPI (a medium screen) and magazines used to be 150LPI ( a fine screen) but have increased over the years towards 175LPI and 200LPI.

There's a difference between a magazine or newspaper and what people print out at home.

Here's a basic article explaining it better:
http://desktoppub.about.com/cs/intermediate/a/measure_lpi.htm

For an example, if I was to output an image at newspaper quality, a 100dpi scan would be fine. If I wanted to output it at magazine quality, a 100dpi scan wouldn't cut it. (After 25 years in printing, I knew my experience would come in handy someday. Lol!)
 
Welp, I've been doing my work at 288DPI for my magazines and 200DPI for my newsprint since 1997 when I started in the industry. I'm not on the print end, just the design/sales end... so what I do is "good enough" evidently.

:D
 
And, as you said, it's the design end. On the design end, you are producing contones for the presses, so you scan for what line screen they are outputting. As I said, a bubble jet printer is an entirely different animal than is an offset press.

The rule of thumb was for scanning an image, the DPI should be 2x that of the output line screen. In essence, a newspaper image could be scanned in at 170dpi and work fine. For a magazine which uses a 150LPI screen, 300dpi has been the norm.

Oh, and there's also the factor of enlargement. When scanned at the 2x rule, the enlargement rule was nothing more than 115%. Optimal would be to scan in the image and it was used at 100%. That way, there was no deterioration from enlargement, and you wouldn't be having an unnecessarily large file size if it had to be reduced.

There is a difference between designing a piece for output and actually outputting the piece. Your 288DPI is fine for scanning and designing, but that does not equate to what the printer is outputting. To say that a printer outputs a newspaper at 200DPI and a magazine at 288DPI is technically incorrect.

I ran presses back in the late 1980's and have been with the prepress end since (well, except for the two years I took off to play bartender. Lol!). I have a feeling that my explanation isn't the clearest, but I think you get what I am saying.

I think I'm getting way off track and too deep into the technical end. The bottom line is that the initial op's question about his scan is that it will not output nicely.
 
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It was a joke! Oh course it will look like crap. Bare minimum is 300 dpi for anything. And you NEVER scale up - only down. GhostSnookie is always bagging on me, so I thought i'd return the favor.


Sure, From across the room. As said before, 300 DPI is standard for quality printing. You are looking at 1/3 of that, so you will see some pixelation, mostly in the background gradients. The majority of that file is solid blocks of color, that should render fine.
 
Ehh, I'm over it. As much as I disagree with you on pretty much everything, you do good work reproducing art. Gotta give you that.
 
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