Digital BW, The Print

Jason DeFontes wrote:

> There's no magic to converting from 16 bit to 8 bit, you just 
> throw away the 8 least significant bits.

It's not as simple as that. As far as I know, PS does dithering
during this conversion which produces smoother image than just throwing
away extra bits (although it is not necessarily noticeable in the printed result).
How does the printer driver do the conversion - probably nobody but its
authors know.

------
Evgueni Tchetchetkine
che@..., che@...
http://www.angelfire.com/music2/etchet0m/


> Message: 8
>    Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2002 16:49:16 -0400
>    From: Jason DeFontes <jason@...>
> Subject: Re: Photoshop or Epson 8 Bit?
> 
> Doug,
> 
> There's no magic to converting from 16 bit to 8 bit, you just 
> throw away 
> the 8 least significant bits. I can't imagine that there would be any 
> difference whether the driver or PS did this. You'd probably 
> save time 
> pushing data down to the printer if you converted in PS first.
> 
> -Jason
> 
> Doug Fisher wrote:
> > It is my understanding that the Epson print driver is only 
> 8 bit.  If true,
> > then a conversion to 8 bits occurs to all 16 bit files 
> before printing.  You
> > can convert the file manually in PS and then print or you 
> can just print the
> > 16 bit file and let the Epson driver do its own conversion 
> as necessary.  Is
> > there any advantage to one method over the other in regards to print
> > quality?  I can run tests but didn't want to "reinvent the 
> wheel" if someone
> > else had already tested this.
> > 
> > Thanks in advance,
> > Doug