
Even Apple, the company that started the whole thing, now sells their displays with much higher resolutions. Today, nearly three decades later, technology has greatly improved and the days of screens with a resolution of only 72 ppi are long gone.
#IDEAL WEB IMAGE RESOLUTION PC#
Third party companies selling monitors for the Macintosh didn't stick to the standard, and neither did competing PC monitors. Later on, as Apple began making larger displays for the Macintosh, they made sure to keep the screen resolutions set to the same 72 pixels per inch so users would always see an accurate on-screen preview of the printed document (as long as they were using an ImageWriter printer).īut the 72 pixels per inch screen resolution was a standard only with Apple, and it didn't last. This made it easy to scale the screen display to the printed page, which meant that your text and graphics could be previewed on the screen at the exact size they would appear when printed. Why 72 pixels per inch? It's because the Macintosh screens were specifically designed to work in perfect harmony with Apple's ImageWriter printers, which had a print resolution of 144 dots per inch - exactly twice the resolution of the screen. These computers included a built-in 9 inch display with a screen resolution of 72 pixels per inch. The origin of the 72 ppi screen resolution dates all the way back to the mid 1980's when Apple released its first Macintosh computers. Some say it's "ppi" ( pixels per inch), others claim it's "dpi" ( dots per inch), and the whole thing would get very confusing if it were not for one small fact - it's all complete nonsense! In this tutorial, we'll learn why there's simply no such thing as a standard web or screen resolution and why, if your images are destined for the web, you don't need to worry about image resolution at all!ĭownload this tutorial as a print-ready PDF! A Little History. You may have even heard it said that while 72 ppi is correct for images displayed on a Mac, a Windows-based PC needs the resolution set to 96 ppi. If you've been around computers and digital images for a while, especially if you're a web designer or a photographer publishing your photos online, you've no doubt heard it said that the correct resolution for images displayed on the web, or on computer screens in general, is 72 pixels per inch (ppi).
