To give you some idea what the scanning quality can be from an ordinary 4" by 6" print, directly from the photo processor, look at the image at the right. It is the full-frame view of an ancient cliff-side indian dwelling, know as Montezuma Castle National Monument, just off Interstate 17, between Flagstaff and Phoenix, in central Arizona. It was shot on Kodak G-100 (ASA 100) film on a sunny (hight-contrast) April afternoon, then processed and printed at a WalMart 1-hour photolab -- no "tricks" -- the standard "consumer" photo processing. The 4' by 6" print was scanned full frame as 2400x3600 pixels, and the image displayed here is 340x514, or one-seventh actual size.

Note the tall column-section in the dwelling, with a single, small window. This small section is shown full-size, below.

Now, as you can easily see that this image doesn't have as much resolution as one scanned from the negative, but there is a lot of detail in most 4"x6" prints !

For the sake of web-bandwidth, all images are 50:1 JPEG compressions of the originals.
ALL images Copyright - © 1972-1998, B.Boone and Media Technology Associates, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
If you're viewing this image on a 14" monitor, in 800x600 mode, the full-resolution image above is about 7" wide and about 5" tall. If you had the full-frame image at this resolution, it would measure 33" by 50" !!

Below, is a second "detail area", located in the lower left corner of the full-frame image.
Now, not all images have detail that can benefit from such high resolution, and the scanning software can analyze an image and suggest lower resolutions than the maximum, but its nice to know that if needed, your "print" can be THIS sharp.

Another consideration in hi-res scanning is storage. This full-frame image, in uncompressed .TIF format is a whopping 26 megabytes, so it is only practical to do these images if you are also going to pay to have them put on a CD for return to you.