AutoCAD TIF output quality Experiments

Since I don't really understand the relationship between DPI, PPI, image size, color mode, and the image quality, I decided to test them out by myself. Although it took me a whole nigh last night, I thought it is worth doing. Now I do know how to get a .TIF image with good quality (no blurry edges of letters and lines) and appropriate image size (several thousand pixels in each dimension, and the file size is about several tens MB).

Here's some tricks what I found out:

1. Scale down the drawing in AutoCAD. This won't decrease the image quality. Actually this can help decrease the file size of the output .TIF file. I used same settings for two prints, one is 10 times scaled up of the other one. And the two files are ~2MB and ~70MB respectively.

2. Use smaller print size in AutoCAD. At first I though I should print a very large size, maybe A2 or A1, to get a good image. Actually this has nothing to do with the image quality. When this size is large, the final .TIF image will be very large. I got a 10,000*10,000 pixel .TIF and my computer got stuck!

3. Usually 600dpi or 720dpi will be good enough.

4. Use 24Bit color. Other color mode doesn't work as well as 24Bit color.