Resolution, Dpi, and Ppi are often confused and difficult to understand. We are going to give a few short explanations and pointers on how to distinguish each and find out what you need to know to get us good artwork. We produce all of our vinyl banners at 1440dpi.
Resolution
Resolution is a measure of dimension. Specifically the width by height of pixels contained in your image. For example some common resolutions are 640x480, meaning 640 pixels wide by 480 pixels high. That's all well and good, but why is that useful? Basically depending on the size of your final product we can use the resolution to determine the quality you can expect. See the image below for an illustration of using a low quality image on a large banner. As you can see when the image is small it looks fine, but when you put it on a large 3' x 10' banner and magnify it looks pixelated and grainy.
Dpi (Dots Per Inch)
DPI stands for Dots Per Inch, basically meaning when you have something at 300 dpi you have 300 dots per square inch. Notice dots per inch does not always corrospond to pixels per inch and less confusing metric. Read more here.
Ppi (Pixels Per Inch
Pixels Per Inch is a less confusing term meaning the number pixels placed per inch. Read more here.