Professor, John? I haven't been called that in the 14 years since I left academia where I was one! LOL I wasn't trying to write a treatise on the subject but it sorta turned out that way... Glad there was some useful information there for even someone as websavvy as you, John.

Bud, the magic number when you go to print anything is 300 dpi. That's the industry standard. When I have prints made from my files at the prof photo lab that I use, I deliver them to them as 300 dpi TIFF files. It doesn't matter that printers can do 1440 dpi. Professional prints are done at 300 dpi and your eye can't see anything much finer than that anyway. That said, the Epson scanner you're talking about gives you 3600 pixels in the long dimension. That translates to a print that would be 12 inches in that direction without having to do any interpolation (resizing enlargement). So, yep, you could get good 8x10s from that scanner if your image file ends up being a full 2800x3600. That may be limited by your source material, in which case the size of the resulting file dimensions in pixels will be smaller.

Hope that this helps, Bud. If I've still not answered the question, let me know...

Gary