Digital BW, The Print

With my first printer/cart I got *bad* hatching and vertical banding 
and ended up returning the printer.  With a new cart it went away (to 
some degree).  The dither "weave" does produce what looks like micro 
banding for certain images, especially in light skintones from grainy 
scans.  From smooth digital images it is almost not an issue.  I 
think it is some aliasing-like phenominea... maybe the frequency of 
grain freaking out the frequency of the dither... I don't know.

When I got my first printer I posted this:

http://www.geocities.com/markhahn2000/7660test.html

It shows how much of effect that different carts can have.  With a 
second printer and a third cart the dither pattern got better for 
this image, but was still obvious under close inspection.  To put it 
in perspective though, this is the only image that printed so 
obviously dithered.  Had I rated the T400CN at 200 it probably would 
have been much better as well since the grain is what causes the 
problems.

mark

...
> My 7660 produces a faint hatch pattern, noticeable in certain areas 
of a print. Initially I 
> tried no end of cleaning cycles, no change. I only use the HP 
Premium Plus Matte, and have 
> also used Ilford Gallerie Classic Pearl, same on both. I was 
thinking this was due to the 
> reported driver problem, and eagerly awaited an update. I'm using 
OSX with the 2.3.7 
> driver, this was the latest last week. Could this simply be a bad 
cartridge?
> 
> Steve Bell