I've had a lot of frustrating starts and stops with my Finke Race photos -- problematic scans, problematic printers, problematic web displays.
On 31die's wise counsel, I went for quicker&smaller&rougher on pictures I scanned for the web. I chose to spend my energies working on high quality prints instead.
It was a great payoff -- the prints' color, sharpness, exposure are coming out extremely well. Much better than any of 72dpi webpage scans.
I've been printing A3 (297mm x 420mm) photos this evening and the resolution is beautiful. It makes me curious how much more I could blow these out -- they are looking great. At these A3 dimensions my images are 365 pixels per inch. My understanding is that as long as they're bigger than 240 pixels per inch, I'm in very good shape.
Learned a few more lessons about the Epson 2100 and Photoshop 7.
1) I think it is always good counsel to clean the ink cartridge before you do a round of printing. Yes, theoretically it wastes ink, but I only print perhaps a few times per month. Invariably the nozzles plug. I end up wasting the ink anyway, as my first photo turns out a banded, wretched mess.
2) I was fucking up Image Resizing for printing. I was leaving 'Resample Image' on -- this was producing lots of bogus resolution. As well, I was leaving the 'Maximize Image' selection on. Epson explicitly warns that this can lead to ugly banding and other crap effects.
So now that I am comfortable with my print output, I can start looking more artistically and editorially at some of my photos and make some nice displays.
Wheeeee