Originally posted by TonyW 
No one has ever printed at 72 ppi (they may think they have!) on an inkjet because it will be upsampled to printers native resolution if you do not do it yourself. 72 dpi is a typical dot matrix printer resolution from many years ago
Upsampling yourself to 300 or 600 ppi is fine if you have Canon printer but is wrong for Epson as it will use 360 or 720 ppi. Doing it yourself to printers native resolution is better than letting print driver upsampled using less than stellar algorithms.
Placing no value on print resolution is absolutely fine. By the same token no value needs to be placed on lens quality/resolving power, diffraction or any other aberration as without treating image data correctly none of it matters as you will have discarded the benefits of good glass with poor printing
Happy with throwing away the benefits of quality equipment at the printing stage is ok by me if it suits the individual.
Take chances with your printing absolutely, and for that matter your photography, but do yourself a favour and at least understand where your printing may fall down
I'd also recommend everyone do some printing at 300 DPI or 360 DPI, whatever is native to your printer, real DPI, not upsampled, there are images, I think of Pinholecam's cityscapes that will use every bit of the resolution provided. Even if on a print you decide to ignore printing guidelines, you still need to recognize which prints won't be affected by print resolution and which will be much better if you exploit it. There will always be images for which it matters little, but there will also be situations where it matters a lot.
If you haven't looked at some images that map your image to a printer 1:1, you won't be able to evaluate whether staying hi-res is appropriate. Everyone should do one or two at least.
But for most of us printing big it's low res or nothing. I've never been disappointed when exceeding my own guidelines, but usually the alternative would be buying a 100 MP camera so I had the required resolution, and that's not going to happen.
I've larger prints on walls, even if the resolution isn't great up close, it's incredibly pleasing to have a larger poster sized image to look at in a room.
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