PPI

If you’ve ever worked on a print design, used Photoshop Elements or any other such program for manipulating raster images, you’ve surely come across the terms DPI (dots per inch) and/or PPI (pixels per inch). Chances are, you’ve also received some confusing DPI/PPI-related requests from clients who don’t understand what these terms mean. Before you start griping, though, pause and ask: How well do you yourself know your way around these terms?

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"Pixels per inch" is a measurement of screen resolution. In computers, pixels per inch (ppi) is a measure of the sharpness (that is, the density of illuminated points) on a display screen .

The more pixels per inch, the crisper the images will look, on your computer screen. 

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This cartoon image has a low resolution. has resolution of only 72PPI!

About your computer screen....

Unless you have purchased a specially designed LCD monitor your screen resolution is between 95 PPI and 120 PPI.

What does that really mean?  There are that many little dots (which all can make all the colors) per inch on your screen.

What about 1920 x 1080?

When talking about screen resolution those  numbers, in pixels, are telling you what size of display you are using.

If you were to measure all the dots horizontally on your screen that's the first number.  On my screen there are 1920 little dots horizontally (The X-axis).

If I measured all the dots vertically I would have 1080 dots, (The Y-axis).

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See Some Examples

This image has a resolution of 72 PPI

These images all look pretty much the same.  The higher the image PPI value is, the "crisper" the image will look.

The human eye has it's limits, and is easily fooled.  All these images look pretty much the same simply because when an image is put in the Internet it simply does not require a 300PPI resolution to look fine.

Most people don't realize the average image on the Internet is really a low resolution image: they load faster,and require less space. 

This image has a resolution of 150dpi

This image has a resolution of 300 PPI

The left image is 300 PPI, The right image is 600 PPI.

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