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Inspiring
January 21, 2011
Question

How many dpi for a standard screen?

  • January 21, 2011
  • 2 replies
  • 46450 views

I read somewhere online that a standard pc displays 96 dpi and a standard Mac 72 dpi. Shoud a web sites’s graphics therefore display at 96 dpi since there are more pc’s than Mac’s?

Also, is it true that going over 96 dpi will just take the images longer to load but without increasing quality on standard computer screens?

This topic has been closed for replies.

2 replies

Inspiring
January 21, 2011

I understand dpi to be a printing resolution for the type of printer that you are going print to. Dots per inch refers to how many dots are printed on paper within a square inch.

Magazines use 300+ dpi, to ensure that the reader sees a smooth image, but if you look closely at a magazine, you will see that almost every bit of colour on the page will have a series of dots of varying sizes made from CYAN, MAGENTA, YELLOW and BLACK and variation of dot sizes between all four colours gives us the wide ranging colours that we see in magazines. If you look at a newspaper, the course paper they use means that the dots used to produce the same image as that in a magazine have to be bigger. This reduces the amount of dots you can fit within an inch. If you look at a newspaper, you will see the dots that make up an image much easier than the same image if it was in a magazine printed on glossy paper.

In my mind, it doesn't matter if you have produce for 72 or 96 ppi (pixels per inch). The site you create will be governed by the users system, and whatever they are looking at, it should all be viewed at the system setting whether it is an image or text. Your site will look bigger on a 72 ppi system when compared to a 96 ppi system. If I post a 300 dpi image which is a 1000 pixels wide, it will only render on the screen a 1000 pixels wide... dpi becomes irrelevant in this instance.

Participating Frequently
January 21, 2011

Concerning images, when designing for the web, DPI is meaningless. If you would like to know the DPI of your monitor, grab a ruler (a real one), hold it up to your monitor and count the number of pixels that appear in one inch.

An image 400px x 400px @ 1dpi, 10dpi, 300dpi, and 72 dpi are 400px by 400px on everyone's screen.

Standard widths of websites tend to not to beyond 1020px.

Check out the 960 grid system. It's an excellent CSS framework to work with.

http://960.gs

hans-g.
Legend
January 21, 2011

Hi,

what do you think about asking Google and and its unfathomable fund?

http://www.google.de/#hl=de&source=hp&q=How+many+dpi+for+a+standard+screen%3F&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&fp=82db71a3d4afbf72

Hans-G.

jmt111Author
Inspiring
January 21, 2011

The answers on Google contradict one another. Some say 72 dpi, others say 96 dpi, others say it’s irrelevant. Even individual pages have self-contradictory answers. For instance, at http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=647983, Kerosene says “Always use 72dpi for images that will actually be displayed on your site” and RRWH says “DPI is irrelevent when displaying images online.” I assume the latter is true because ScanTips.com has written an entire manifesto against 72 dpi at http://www.scantips.com/no72dpi.html?

John Waller
Community Expert
Community Expert
January 21, 2011

You're confusing yourself.

1 image pixel = 1 pixel on screen.

dpi is irrelevant on screen. It only matters when printing.

A 100px x 100px image is always 100px x 100px on screen.