laser printers

G
Posted By
Gandalf
Jul 9, 2004
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562
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I have a brother laser printer in my office.
Are laser printers good for printing pivtures? And which paper should I use?

thanks
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R
Roberto
Jul 9, 2004
My big complaint about laser printers for photos be they black and white laser or the very expensive color lasers is I have yet to find one that does diffusion dither type printing. All of them I have seen use a pattern dither to mix the colors or to make up the gray shades and I find this patterning to be very…ugly. Even with a 1200 dpi laser the pattern dithering is still a problem. For printing pictures I think you are better off with one of the much cheaper high end inkjet printers.

Also, there is no way to get glossy prints with a laser. Even if you find glossy laser printer safe paper the toner is matte so anyplace on the glossy paper that you print with be matte which will kill what little illusion there maybe for it being a photo.

John

Gandalf wrote:

I have a brother laser printer in my office.
Are laser printers good for printing pivtures? And which paper should I use?

thanks
H
henrik2000
Jul 10, 2004
Diffusion dithering is not all that bad on b/w laser printers. If you do print from an imaging software, at least. PhotoImpact does it. I believe Paint Shop does it, too. Good old Picture Publisher does a perferct job here.
Photoshop doesn’t do it from the print dialog, but you can dither beforehand, through the bitmap mode, but this requires a bit of experience. You also might want to do diffusion dithering for the stored file itself if you do print from say Word or other page layout softwares. Again, experience required. Dithering to the saved (not the print-only) file is also possible with freewares like IrfanView. Of course it would be better if laser printers offer diffusion dithering in the printer settings. I think i saw an old HP which does it. I believe with resolutions like 1200×600 dpi, printer manufacturers might believe diffusion dithering is no longer necessary; i feel they see it as an emergency measure for low-res printers only. Btw, my Kyocera with 1200×600 doesn’t do diffusion dithering, but the prints look very decent anyway.

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