Well I had a chance today to run off some prints and scan them in.
All were done on an Epson Pro 11880 at 720x1440dpi super microweave on, bi-directional, no colour management (colour managed from Photoshop) on Epson Premium Glossy Photo Paper 170 using the Epson canned profile with one exception - I made one print from Qimage.
Of a total of 7 prints, 4 were printed to the same physical size (about 16"x9") and 3 were printed physically smaller by using the native pixels at higher resolutions as I'll detail below.
The image is 2076x1168 pixels (a crop of the full frame), opened in ACR 5 where adjustments were done, including sharpening for print at medium level. For Qimage a PSD was saved out and then printed. At the chosen print size, the native pixels provided 129ppi resolution.
The following prints were done:
Upressed to 360ppi in PS CS4 standard
Upressed to 360ppi in PS CS4 smoother
Upressed to 360ppi in Qimage as a result of printing to the specified size
Printed at 129ppi native in PS CS4
Printed at 360ppi native in PS CS4
Printed at 240ppi native in PS CS4
Printed at 180ppi native in PS CS4
The last three obviously printed smaller than the approximate 16"x9"
All of the full size prints were scanned in using an Epson V700 at 300dpi with unsharp mask off and descreening off. The prints that were smaller were scanned at appropriately higher resolutions to provide the same pixel output to the saved scan. The scans are of just a portion of the prints to avoid the files being too large.
The 7 images are linked here for those who are interested, in no particular order (ie does not match the order above):
Image AImage BImage CImage DImage EImage FImage GIn the next post, I'll list which are which.
The scans don't tell the full story, as the real test is how it looks to direct observers and not a resampled (ie scanned) copy of the print. I hope some will find it of interest/use to compare. It's a not a definitive "do it this way" or "do it that way" and I'll let the reader determine their own conclusions (my preferences are well posted :-)