I spent 20 years in commercial printing and prepress, and can tell you that the general rule is that an image printed at 100% size should have a dpi of twice what the line screen is that your printer will be using. The printer you select will generally ask you to select the line screen (ls), or provide you with what their standard is. Most standard magazines are printed at 133ls, 150ls and 175ls, so for an image printed at those line screens, you would optimally need 266dpi, 300dpi, and 350dpi respectivley. Higher end publications are generally printed at 200ls to 300ls, with those requiring dpi's of 400 and 600 respectively. All of our proofing on large format Epsons is processed using those same files with the same settings. To sum it up, use a dpi of twice the line screen to print at 100%. 10% less than double will likely be unnoticeable, and anything more than double does not hurt but may add slightly to file processing times.
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