Let me add a couple of comments to the above responses.
If you do any photoediting, you are going to lose some information present in the scan. So it makes sense to scan at a higher resolution that what is absolutely necessary to produce enough pixels for your printer. Using an Epson 3200, I scan at 3200 ppi and then reduce to 2160 in my photoeditor. I use that because it is a simple multiple of 720, which is supposedly the native resolution of my Epson 1280 printer. What that means is that the printer firmware doesn't have to do as much work. It is a different issue than what is an adequate number of pixels to send the print for the size of the print. I then reduce the resolution further depending on the size of the print, but again I use multiples of 360 if possible. It is also true that the scanned image doesn't contain much resolvable detail above 1800 ppi, so even reducing the resolution to 2160 doesn't result in the loss of such detail. The point is that although the scanner produces the requested number of pixels, the optics aren't adequate to resolve detail at the same level.
Bookmarks