Most desktop inkjet printers give their best reasonable quality at 200 to 240 ppi image resolution. If you have a small image that doesn't meet that resolution, should you just print it anyway? Should you resample it to optimum printing resolution, then print? Should you invest $$ in the Genuine Fractals plugin? Or, are the claims true that you can get better quality by resampling the image in several steps?

The images below were cropped from a digital camera photo taken at low resolution of 640 x 480. A 100 ppi print would have been 4.8 inches by 6.4 inches. One was printed as-is, at that size. One was resampled in Photoshop using bicubic resampling, one was resampled the same way but in small increments (7) to 240 ppi, and the other was done using Genuine Fractals Print Pro. All were printed with identical settings on an Epson PhotoEX, then scanned at 75 ppi for the web photos. No retouching or sharpening was done.

Form your own conclusions, keeping in mind that these are scanned from the prints, and viewing them on a monitor is not exactly the same as seeing the actual prints. Every effort was made to prevent extra jpeg damage from resaving as jpeg files, except in the camera and for final compression for the web photos. My conclusions are below.

Number 1: Top left, the image resampled in Photoshop to 240 ppi. The Genuine Fractals image is as good, and slightly sharper, but a resampled image nearly always needs a touch of sharpening, which would make the images about the same, without spending the extra money for the software.

Number 2: Bottom left, the GF resampled image. I would have said it's tied for first, but it costs more, and is more burdensome to use for a quick print.

Number 3: This goes to the bottom right image, which was resampled in increments, a big waste of time in my opinion. The image does appear a bit smoother, but on a closer look it is just slightly blurred because of all the resampling.

Number 4: Top right, printed at 100 ppi. Look at the chrome strip along the side of the car, you can see the jagged edges. Actually, this image is not all that bad for 100 ppi, but it is different enough to tell me that resampling is the way to do the best job when resolution drops that far, and that the printer driver doesn't do it for you.

Note: To be fair to Genuine Fractals, this double or triple resizing of an image is not what it does best. If you want to resize to 10 times or 20 times the size of the original image, and for very large posters and murals, there is no competition; Genuine Fractals does a much better job. But if you accidentally had your digital camera set to 640 x 480 resolution, snapped the photo of a lifetime and wanted to print a 4 x 6 or 5 x 7, you could just resample the image to the optimum resolution for your printer.