02/22/2007 High Speed vs. Uni-Directional Printing
UPDATE
After my last post about the -lack of-
difference between the High Speed and the Uni-Directional Printing
mode, I intended to extend the range of my testing by checking the
appearance of some real image. As suggested in a forum thread on
this website (here),
I printed 4 times the target provided by Bill Atkinson and also
a Grainger Rainbow + Grayscale target I put together myself and that
I normally use to verify the softproofing capabilities of my custom
made profiles.
I ended up with 8 prints, printed in 4 different ways:
1-1440dpi-uni-directional printing
2-1440dpi-bi-directional printing
3-2880dpi-uni-directional printing
4-2880dpi-bi-directional printing
To my surprise, even to the closest inspection, I
could NOT detect any visible difference in the test prints. Not only
all the colors looked the same to my eyes (this was actually expected)
but I could NOT see any difference in the color transitions, and these
targets do have a lot of tonal transitions!
Using real photographs as in the test image below,
I did see some subtle differences in the finest details due to a coarser
dither algorithm when printed at 1440dpi-bi-directional mode.
My conclusion, so far, is that on the Epson 3800 there
is only a slight advantage in using the printing modes traditionally
associated with better print quality and that in many instances the
slight quality loss is adequately compensated by the improved print
speed, especially in a large volume print-on-demand environment. |
