Digital BW, The Print

Steve Kale wrote:

> I understood good practice to be at least always use a clean factor of the
> print resolution ie 2880/4=720, 2880/5=576, 2880/6=480, 2880/8=360,
> 2880/9=320, 2880/10=288.  The 300 simply came about as a result of the old
> 2x150lpi (as Bob Frost noted in an earlier post).
>
My understanding is that the two are not related.

The output resolution, say 300 dpi, that you send the printer will be 
uprezed or downrezed by the driver to 360 dpi.

The print rez, say 1440, really controls how many ink dots the driver 
uses to create each pixel. And this is why the driver must resize your 
incoming 300 dpi data stream to 360 dpi - so that it can easily handle 
the math to represent the individual pixels, and the dither pattern it 
uses to "flow the tones" from one pixel to the next.

Most RIPs, being considerably larger and more sophisticated programs, 
don't need the resizing step. So I'm told.

I could be wrong though.
--
Bruce Watson