RE: Judy : was: More on the limits of Grayscale now insight into how printer swork


ken (watsok@frii.com)
Sat, 31 Jul 1999 14:19:01 -0600


Pells,

They are like pixels ( dots ) on a CRT display tube. You can see the pixels
if you look really close to your screen. Pells might be short hand for
picture elements. Another way of looking at this is what is the smallest dot
that your printer can print assuming it prints all four colors.

In the old days printers would download "images" to print. This was because
there was not a common language for fonts. ( Adobe wanted a lot of money for
Postscript) so these images were processed in the computer and sent to the
printer. Today there is true type fonts and in general the computer sends a
command to print a letter and specifies what size font to draw / print. This
requires a lot less memory. The thing of interest to the list thought is
how do modern printers send "bit images" I think every manufacturer has
it's own Printer Control Language so direction for this may be manufacture
specific.

The scanner comment about telling the install software that you have a high
res. printer helps the scanner to always scan at high res. Not all scanner
software asks at what resolution you want to scan. An even if the software
does Scanner manufactures LIE A LOT about the resolution of their products.
Does every one realize that you can not buy a scanner that has higher than
600DPI resolution for less than $400? If you think different let me
know..do not believe what is on the outside of the box says.

-----Original Message-----
From: Judy Seigel [mailto:jseigel@panix.com]
Sent: Saturday, July 31, 1999 12:05 AM
To: alt-photo-process-l@skyway.usask.ca
Subject: RE: was: More on the limits of Grayscale now insight into how
printerswork

On Fri, 30 Jul 1999, ken wrote:

> It would be the prudent thing to always tell the scanner software during
> installation that you have a very high resolution printer. This is to
keep
> the scanner software from tricking you out into thinking that you are
> scanning at the highest resolution when in fact it is scanning at a lower
> resolution. This of course is the starting point of getting your image to
a
> digital negative.

Now I'm really confused. My scanner software has always asked me -- not
what resolution printer I have -- but what resolution I want to scan at.
Doesn't everybody's ? (My Microtek did that, the new UMax does, too.)

As for the printer telling me what resolution it's really printing at --
all I know is that if the file is over a megabyte or two, I'll get a
message saying it (laser printer) couldn't print at the specified
resolution. Supposedly it has 4 mbs of memory, but maybe it uses some of
them for something else.

Trying to get around that, instead of doing all 4 color separations in one
printing, I printed them 1 at a time (out of Pagemaker), but whether this
actually made a difference I couldn't tell, because the printer was silent
on the topic.

Finally, Ken says to figure resolution put dots or marks "an exact number
of pells apart." I've heard of "poles apart," but not pells apart.
What's a pell?

Thanks in advance,

Judy



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