Quality
Adds Up
If you can produce acceptable quality from your inkjet printer,
you can save thousands of dollars, avoid expensive print jobs
and look like you spent big bucks when you didn't. To get the
BEST results - realistic color, sharp detail, smooth gradations
- you need to pay careful attention to your inkjet printing
conditions and to the materials you use. The payoff for your
attention can be HUGE.
What is "acceptable quality"?
Unlike beauty, "acceptable
reproduction quality" is not in the eye of the beholder.
Acceptable quality means you cannot easily tell the printing
method by casually looking at the image. If you cannot tell the
method, then you can use the method best suited to your
situation. Until quality inkjet became available, there was
non-inexpensive way to get acceptable quality for short-run or
fast turnaround color pages.
The Basics of Printing an Image
Long before computers, printers were re-producing photos by
breaking them up into dots. This early form of digitization was
called "screening" because they literally placed a grid screen
over the image before photographing it to make printing plates.
Each cell of the grid or "dot" was converted to an amount of ink
to be placed at that location by the printing press. If you look
at a black and white photo in a current magazine with a
magnifying glass you will see the dots. The dots trick the eye
into seeing a complete image. Color images are printed by making
4 passes through the printing press, one for each of the four
colors printers normally use. The digital age has not changed
how we see images on paper.
Behind the scenes, computers have dramatically changed the
speed and cost of printing. The special skills that were handed
down from father to son (sorry, few women were allowed) for
hundreds of years are now available to all in software that
dramatically reduce the skills required.
