poor result with HP 800 ps

[Guido Gentilli]

- VW 2008 sp3

- plotter HP 800 ps turned to higher print quality

- printer Konica Minolta magic color 2450 (A4 size)

This morning I just downloaded driver upgrade for HP 800 ps hoping that helps improving poor printing quality. It didn't help. Troubles seems are here to stay.

i.e.:

anti aliasing OFF: pixeling look like commodore 64, curved lines much similar to stairs.

anti aliasing ON: some improvement, but appears kind of "faded zones", areas in the output where colors are paler than surrounding. In general, everything is quite blur.

Both results are pretty bad.

With Minolta printer things go much better, you get sharper lines and no pixeling effect. Have to say that with anti aliasing ON even with this device you got "faded zones". It's no such a big problem, since even with anti aliasing turned OFF you got a decent result.

Anyone have experienced the same troubles? Any suggestions?

Edited September 16, 2008 by Guido Gentilli

[brudgers]

Pixelation problems can sometimes be fixed by adjusting the halftone settings.

I've had success with this technique when printing bitmaps and pdfs.

In windows XP, I prefer to make these adjustments via control panel-->properties-->printing preferences--->advanced.

[HP Sauce]

The 800 PS is the exact same plotter we used to use, and have never had a problem with quality issues from OSX nor Windows.

I would hope you've merely got the DPI set too low. You should only need to use "Best" print quality for photos/renderings etc. "Normal" should produce drawings with no pixellation/blurring.

[M.CH]

Heres a couple of thing to check in VW:

In File>Document Settings>Document Preferences> Resolution

Is this figure 72 dpi, set it to 300 dpi

If you are printing Sheet Layers check

Tools>Organisation>Sheetlayers>Edit>Resolution set to 300 dpi

When you print to pdf what is the quality of the pdf file like?

HTH

[Guido Gentilli]

Thank you to everyone for suggestions.

We find out this solution:

- turn anti aliasing on

- export a pdf, tuning grey tone for frozen sheets up to 100% instead of default 69% (since we don't use to print frozen items it doesn't matter).

- than print pdf file.

It works. It seems to be complicated, but actually, on average prints from quite big drawings, it works much, much faster than direct way. I am speaking of few minutes instead of 30 - 45 minutes.

Edited September 17, 2008 by Guido Gentilli