"Alan Meyer" wrote in message =
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snip
Finally, I should note that I am not a professional
photographer, and certainly not a graphics arts person. At
one time I would have called myself an advanced amateur
photographer, but now I'm just a guy who likes taking travel
and family photos. I'm also 58 years old and my eyes may
not be as sharp as those of a 20 year old. So as we always
say, your mileage may vary.

Alan
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I own a 8Mp camera and I feel my own comparisons which happen
to differ from yours aren't bias because it can be set to shoot at less
than full potential.
Looking at strickly just numbers, if you fed a Noritsu printer an image
that has an image resolution the same as the printer's capacity, you
couldn't do any better than that.
People are fickle, prone to pooh poohing what they earlier wished for.
They see the pixel count they asked for but now the price makes it
undesirable. Tests, just like yours, using non-photographic paper with
a laser printer to boot because it's cheaper, using images downloaded
from a websight for which you had no control over it's creation, says
more about you than what you thought you were trying to accomplish.

We used to see many paper longevity posts here (acceleration tests).
Some involved putting prints on a dashboard of a car in 150 degree
heat for 3 days. Now that 4x6 prints can be had much cheaper from
a local CVS than from home I don't see anymore testimonials. See?
It's the money, or lack of, that drives the desire for more or less and
how we rationalize why we can or can't.

mark_