X-bit labs

Personal Laser Printers Roundup: Monochrome Printing (page 16)

Category: Other

by Vasily Melnik

[ 01/19/2006 | 06:23 PM ]

Printing Quality

The print resolution test was performed for the two available resolutions: 600 and 1200dpi. Let’s take a look at the scans.

600dpi

1200dpi

And we see the familiar artifact, this time even more conspicuous. The smudge now has the shape of the number “6”. The artifact is present on both the printouts, indicating an error in the driver’s processing of the print task.

Quite expectedly, the real resolution remains the same at any settings, while the 1200dpi mode means nothing else but software processing to make the contours of the image objects sharper.

600dpi

The halftone image doesn’t look quite well in the standard print mode. The lightest tones are not printed out at all. You can barely see the borders between the areas of the Gamma 1.0 gray-scale.

600dpi + Toner Save

The fill density is overall greatly reduced in the toner-saving mode, so the above-mentioned problems persist.

1200dpi

Choosing the 1200dpi resolution makes the image visually more saturated, but I can’t see any big differences from the 600dpi printout on a closer inspection.

The printer uses variable-size dots placed at the same distance to produce halftones in each print mode. I couldn’t solve the problem of poor reproduction of the lightest tones by adjusting the driver settings.