By scanning at 300, you are making the image larger to where you can print out a sharper picture.
I always scan large and if I want a smaller print out, I resize it.
Best thing to do is experiment.
Try it and see what happens.
I scan using Adobe but copy & paste into PSP to work on.
I should really set my scanner up to open in PSP cause I always C&P it to there.

~Urlee~

This is what I am trying to do. Most pictures on line are quite small, when I save them and try to enlarge to say 5x7 sometimes they are blurry. Sometimes they turn out great. I was just wondering if I printed them out at the size they are, then scanned them at a higher resolution, opened them in PSP to enlarge, would that do what I'm looking to do?
Thanks Urlee, yes definately set up your scanner to PSP, I didn't have to do anything with either of my scanners to achieve that, guess I just lucked out it automatically did it. I can scan directly into any of my graphic programs or use the scanner as stand alone.
{{!gwi}}Carol

The answer to your question is: no. If you pick up a low res image off the internet and/or a JPG image which is damaged from compression (almost all images on WWW fit this category) then you have a fixed amount of information. There's nothing you can do to increase that amount of information.

If you print the image large enough and the pixels show, you can use interpolation to increase the pixel count. This will smooth out the pixels but it does not increase the total information content. Interpolation can also further damage the information in the image. If your software allows you to increase the res of an image, it's best to make multiple small increases rather than one large increase.

If you're scanning original work at your desktop and you have questions about what resolution to scan with, the link provided is a scalling/scan res calculator.

Here is a link that might be useful: scan res calc

Thank you so much for that info feldminte. I appreciate your reply.
Carol