I'm having some business cards done on a color laser, saw the proof
today and it's pixelated, I was unimpressed. I gave them what they
asked for, 300DPI. They say now to give them 600DPI, I doubt it's the
problem because resolution of the print looks more like 72DPI than 300.

How do color lasers work? It has a chip that converts the raster to
something the printer can use... can it be resampling my image? I don't
understand why the proof looked like such a lower resolution.

Hi!

> How do color lasers work? It has a chip that converts the raster to
> something the printer can use... can it be resampling my image? I don't
> understand why the proof looked like such a lower resolution.

I suppose the printer's onboard controller and page rendering engine could
be doing something to your image, but any color laser printer driver I've
seen so far allows the user to select from a variety of "raster compression"
options--including possible lossy compression.

The drivers I've seen so far usually set this option to "medium" or
"automatic".

William

In message <(E-Mail Removed)>,
(E-Mail Removed) writes
>I'm having some business cards done on a color laser, saw the proof
>today and it's pixelated, I was unimpressed. I gave them what they
>asked for, 300DPI. They say now to give them 600DPI, I doubt it's the
>problem because resolution of the print looks more like 72DPI than 300.
>
>How do color lasers work? It has a chip that converts the raster to
>something the printer can use... can it be resampling my image? I don't
>understand why the proof looked like such a lower resolution.
>
Suppose you gave them your card in a high res pdf file. What are the
actual dimensions of the image and how big is it to be printed.

Either the image you've sent them isnt as big as you think, or they've
flicked a strange setting somewhere.

--
Timothy

It sounds like you've been "RIP"ed off ;-)

Someone doesn't know what they are doing. What file format was the
image you gave them in?

Be careful of a Jpeg compression ratio that is too high.

Art

(E-Mail Removed) wrote:

> I'm having some business cards done on a color laser, saw the proof
> today and it's pixelated, I was unimpressed. I gave them what they
> asked for, 300DPI. They say now to give them 600DPI, I doubt it's the
> problem because resolution of the print looks more like 72DPI than 300.
>
> How do color lasers work? It has a chip that converts the raster to
> something the printer can use... can it be resampling my image? I don't
> understand why the proof looked like such a lower resolution.
>

(E-Mail Removed) wrote:
> I'm having some business cards done on a color laser, saw the proof
> today and it's pixelated, I was unimpressed. I gave them what they
> asked for, 300DPI. They say now to give them 600DPI, I doubt it's the
> problem because resolution of the print looks more like 72DPI than 300.
>
> How do color lasers work? It has a chip that converts the raster to
> something the printer can use... can it be resampling my image? I don't
> understand why the proof looked like such a lower resolution.
>
From what I have seen in looking at color laser printers, 600 dpi does
not mean the same dot to dot pitch you get with a mono printer (with
each color), but instead dot to dot spacing to some colors is 1/600,
others 1/300, and dot to dot of the same color is 1/150.
Example; printing all color dots is;
rgbkrgbkrgbkrgbk (red green blue black)

printing just red is on the same grid, like:
r r r r

gr