Print Quality Reference Guide

Four tables

DPI standards, paper weights in gsm, standard bleed allowances, and the mistakes that most often send a job back. Read it here, or take the PDF and pin it above the printer where the decisions actually get made.

DPI: what the numbers mean in practice

Seventy-two is the screen baseline. Not a print resolution. One-fifty is the floor for something acceptable and is genuinely fine for a poster read from two metres away; three hundred is the commercial standard for anything held in the hand. Six hundred is for fine line art, very small type and technical drawings, where the edges rather than the tones carry all of the information.

Note which way that rule runs. Higher is not automatically better: a photograph at 600 DPI is simply a large file that prints identically to the same photograph at 300, because no press can resolve the extra.

Paper weight, and what it feels like

Eighty gsm is ordinary office paper. One-twenty is a heavier flyer with better opacity, and opacity matters more than people expect: print double-sided on 80 and the reverse shows through.

One-seventy is thin card, roughly a decent postcard. Two-fifty to three-fifty is proper card stock — business cards, premium covers, anything meant to feel like an object rather than a page.

Check your printer's specification before ordering heavy stock. Many home and office machines will not feed much above 200 gsm, and the failure mode is a jam rather than a disappointing print.

Bleed

Three millimetres for most commercial print. Five for wide-format and saddle-stitched booklets. Zero for office printing on full sheets, where the page edge is the trim.

The rule is simple and the omission is common. If colour runs to the edge of the finished piece, the artwork has to extend past it, because guillotines drift and without the overhang that drift shows up as a white sliver down one side.

The five pitfalls

No bleed, which is the one above. Fonts not embedded, where the press substitutes something else and your line breaks move. RGB images sent to a CMYK press, where the vivid screen blue comes back muted. Images below 150 DPI at the size they will actually print. And hairlines — strokes under about 0.25 point, which look fine on screen and may not render at all.

Every one of those is cheap to check before sending and expensive to discover afterwards, which is the entire argument for having the card on the wall.

Ask for the spec sheet

These are general standards. Every printer has its own requirements, and theirs are the ones that matter. Some want 5 mm of bleed, some want a particular colour profile, some will take RGB and convert it for you without being asked.

Related: resolution checker for whether a specific image is big enough, and the bleed and margin calculator for the exact dimensions to supply.