On Thu, 28 Jun 2001 22:04:12 +0100 Steve Greenbank
(steve@gccl.fsbusiness.co.uk) wrote:
> The only thing you have to watch with the digital printing labs is that
> they
> show perfectly things like grain and posturisation. My Epson hides all
> but
> the worst cases due to the way it lays down the ink.
Don't be too sure the Epson is doing it wrong. My lab has a new Noritsu
printer which does gratifyingly colour-accurate output on RA4 paper.
However it hallucinates posterisation in skin tones and grain is - argh -
increased on some images. Yup, apparently due to our old pal aliasing due
to some bad resampling going on within the printer. Look closely and you
can see the raster pattern which writes the image to the photographic
paper. It's a rather more objectionable than Epson dither as it's regular
but uses variable dot size, and you can make out very faint banding. Lab
not happy, and it's definitely not my files - it behaves the same with all
input. Even with a 50Mb TIFF printed at 7x5".
They also have a Kodak dye-sub, which gives no grain nor posterisation,
but is soft as a print on blotting paper.
I'm still looking...
Regards
Tony Sleep
- Online portfolio & exhibit; + film scanner
info & comparisons
