Digital BW, The Print

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "Roy Harrington" 
<roy@h...> wrote:
> I have two suspicions on the issue.  First, is just that the large 
number of inks
> puts a more critical burden on all the transitions from ink to 
ink.  Since there are more
> transitions and they happen more steeply.  The other is the 
variable dotsize transitions.
> This isn't an issue for the 2200 at 2880dpi but does show up in 
1440dpi.

Roy, couldn't you just set the dot size to the smallest dot and let 
the dither pick up all the rest of the work? I know on most of the 
commercially available color RIPs this is an option. This is the 
trick that people use to get the finer quality out of a 76/9600 when 
using the 1440 or 720 faster print modes. If not then you might need 
to do a linearization for each dot size, and then all the other 
programming involved to switch between those different maps, which is 
another thing that some of the color RIPs will do.

As far as the ink to ink crossovers go, I can't offer any help with 
that since I don't run that kind of system. I will say that sometimes 
I find it helpful to graph out the linearized densities on paper, and 
then make the curves for mixing on paper. Don't know if that would 
help or not, and again my experience is mostly for color ink mixing.

In the end, based on what you have already seen between the different 
dot sizes, I'd lean in that direction first with either a fixed dot 
size, or with seperate linearization tables for each dot size (which 
sounds really easy when typing it, but I bet it's not so simple to 
program).