Digital BW, The Print

Jeff Medkeff wrote:




> I have a heavy shooting schedule for the next couple days, then I'll get 
> back to the C86 debugging.

Ok, I lied. I couldn't keep my hands off of it. I've hit on something 
that reduces the dotting, at least in the margin areas of the image.

I got a copy of driver version 5.4 and sadly, it made no difference.

However, I observed that the most affected area of my print was the 
right-hand margin (I was printing a 5x7 on 8.5x11 stock). There are 
probably five times the number of dots in the right margin, compared to 
any other margin. Watching the printer, I noted that the right margin 
was 'overflown' by the print head on each cycle, while the left margin 
was overflown only every few cycles. The top and bottom margins hardly 
got overflown at all.

That got me thinking about high speed mode, which I determined I had 
unchecked. I think Paul Roark mentioned on his webpage that high speed 
mode is usually OK, so I checked it and reprinted.

In high speed mode, the right margin doesn't get overflown by the print 
head nearly as much. And on the print, there were far fewer black dots 
in the right margin. In a 2" square area I selected, there were ~80 dots 
in the low-speed mode print, and five dots in high-speed mode print. 
This is getting to the point where you have to start looking for them 
pretty carefully to see them.

So, Marty, have you been using high-speed mode?

I'm not sure whether the dotting in light image areas is reduced or not. 
  I don't see why it would be, but dots in toned image areas are harder 
to see. I'll have to do some further experimentation to convince myself 
either way.

Anyone using C86 with EZ but not reporting small random black dots - I'd 
be interested to know whether wide right margins are affected by this 
dotting problem when you print with high-speed turned off. In lieu of 
that, if one of you wants to see the experimental prints I just made, 
I'd be happy to mail them somewhere.

--
Jeff Medkeff
Eagle River, Alaska