Digital BW, The Print

At 06:34 AM 2/11/2003 +0000, DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com 
wrote:
>Your view certainly is the majority one. I just can't see it myself.
>Nor can a few others. Your "degraded eyesight" theory is about the
>most plausible one I've heard.

I've tested it quite a bit.  My wife is a (chamber) musician
who often has groups of other musicians over to play or
practice and I use them as the test audience for my
printing experiments.

Over the lest few weeks I've been trying black-only printing
using my 870 at 1440 DPI and 2200 at 2880 DPI and testing
the results on them.  Most people see the dots, some don't.
INVARIABLY the people who don't report that they can't
see things close up.   If I ask them to hold the print at a distance
they can focus on they invariably hold it farther from their
face than the others.

Obviously there are also psychological and behavioral issues,
too.  Most people don't look at 13x19" prints close-up; they
look at them from feet away, where the dots won't show.  But
we're photographers and many photographers, including me,
DO examine prints close up.  So it depends.

I could make a b-o print and give it to a non-photographer
as a gift, and they might be happy with it and hang it in their
livingroom until the day their photographer brother-in-law
comes over and points out all the dots.