Homebrew PCBs

John Coppens <john@...> writes:
> This is probably too obvious, but still...

My dad always told me to check the stupid things first.  Yes, it's
obvious.  Yes, I checked it anyway ;-)

> (At least) some printer drivers, when fed with gray scale images,
> use (random dot) dithering.  Print quality for PC boards and other
> line drawing items improves immensely when switching to pure b/w
> printing.

The artifacts are on the scale of a pixel or so.  I've looked at it
under a microscope, it's not anything that could be attributed to the
pc asking for the wrong pixels, especially since I'm sending
postscript directly to the printer from one PC, and a raster from the
other.  And three different laser printers do the same thing, to
various degrees, even though on one *my* software is generating the
raster.

The inkjet does the same thing, even though I know the driver isn't
dithering it.  Apparently, the print head just can't shoot ink drops
accurately.

These consumer-level devices just aren't engineered for the type of
accuracy we're hoping for :-P