This is a measurement commonly used to describe the quality of printers and scanners, it refers to how many pixels per square inch that it is able to print/scan. The higher the DPI, the smoother the quality of the image will be when either printed or scanned.

Printers and scanners both come with the ability (software driven) to alter their respective DPI. This can be useful if, for instance, you wanted to print out something on draft to save ink, you could lower the DPI of your printer, and subsequently the ink used.

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