Chris M wrote: What you propose is something to do if you are desperate, but not something you'd want to do routinely. Taking a picture of an 8.5" x 11" sheet of paper with a 1.2 mpix camera would get you 113 DPI. In reality, it is worse than that. 99% of all digital cameras lie about their DPI -- a 1.2 mpix camera doesn't have 1.2 mpix red, 1.2m green, 1.2m blue sensors. Different sensors have different patterns, but essentially they count each r, g, or b subsample as a pixel and interpolate. a common pattern is a tiling like this R G B G G B G R Heavy duty image processing does its darnedest to hide this fact, but it is obvious in certain circumstances. Take a picture of a B&W newspaper picture -- you'll get lots of color fringing. The only camera sensor that doesn't do this is the one from foveon: http://www.foveon.com/ This is a nice tie in to classiccmp -- the CEO of Foveon is Federico Faggin, co designer of the 8080 and co-founder of Zilog. Finally, the linearity of cameras is horrible for work like this, so the effective DPI will drop even lower.