Perfect....just what I needed. Thanks!

If you want to zoom in on just 1/4 of the image size then the size should be 2620x1920, which is 4 times 655x480.

GWIII: Kelly is a genius, and normally you can believe everything he says, but...
...if you want to zoom in on just 1/4 of the image size, you only need to double the horizontal and vertical sizes: 1310 x 960. (i.e. for example a 1' x 1' square is one fourth of a 2' x 2' square...)

Also, since your photos will likely not match the shape of the project (std 4:3, or widescreen 16:9), the easiest thing to do is simply worry about the vertical resolution and let the horizontal pixels resize accordingly: resize to (whatever) x 480 for a "landscape" format digital photo, etc., or maybe (whatever) x 600 if you are going to do a little bit of zooming.

Tim L

Tim, by 1/4 size i meant 1/4 in both height and width. In other words, 1/4 the linear size, not the area. You yourself refer to image sizes as 2' x 2' or 1310x960. If you mean area, you would say 4 square feet or 1.2Megapixels.

But, yes, i agree that without extreme specification it can be confusing.

Cienworks, I am a bit confused, please forgive my inability to get my head around this. In the past I have understood you to say that scan resolution for photos isn't very important when we jump from scanned image land to videoland since once we exceed the amount of horizontal lines, we are not gaining anything. Although when I scanned an image at 75DPI it was indeed very pixelated on the TV screen. From reading this post, it seems that there are times that it does matter what your scan resolution is. I want to make sure that I understand this. I am in the market for a new scanner and printer and the optical image resolution of the all-in-ones are quite a bit lower than a stand alone scanner, and if a very high resolution scanner isn't going to gain me anything, I could use the desk space gained by having an all-in-one. BTW, any recommendations on a scanner or all-in-one? Again, thanks for helping perpetual newbies like myself, you helped me a lot in the past when my username was montage-I forgot my password and they wouldn't let me re-use that name.

75dpi means absolutely nothing. It's totally useless information ... because it's incomplete. What are you scanning at 75dpi? Is it a postage stamp, or a poster? If it's a postage stamp then 75dpi is way to low. If it's a poster then 75dpi is way too high. A postage stamp at 75dpi would probably be about 70 x 80 pixels. A movie poster would probably be about 2100x2600 pixels. So, is 75dpi a good scanning resolution? Who knows? No way i or anyone else could tell you.

You've gotta do some math. Take a look at the picture you want to scan and figure out the smallest area of it that you want to have fill the video frame. Say you want to crop in on someone's head and shoulders and in the picture that's about 1.5" high. In order to get 1.5" to fill a 480 pixel high frame you would need 320dpi. Scanning somewhere around 300 or 600 dpi would work well. If you have an 8x10 and you want to use the whole 8" high picture then 60dpi would work.

dpi on it's own doesn't tell you anything. dpi and image size both need to be considered together. In video neither means much because the size of the image changes depending on the size of the monitor you view it on. It's much better to just refer to pixel dimentions, such as 1310x960, which is meaningful on it's own without dpi or inches mattering at all.