I was thinking, this morning, about why I make my maps at such high resolutions. I think it comes down to my photography years, and how having a larger negative (I shot up to 4x5) produced a better end-result in terms of clarity, colour, and tone (more or less); this influenced my choices in lenses and film type as well. This has carried over, for me, into my imaging on computers from the first hand-held rolling scanner I purchased (in the 80's...wow) to a joyful jump to and EGA graphics card (while lusting over the Targa 256 colour cards I could never afford) to making files as large as I can, knowing I can always reduce them well, but rarely enlarge them without losing quality.

When you're making your regional or local map, floorplan or diagram, what influences your choice about resolution, scale, etc? Do you have a default you always use (working at 1x or 2x final output resolution (when you know it) is one I commonly hear and use myself for some of the final image manipulation of photos) ?