>>4312355>The data sheet states "5760x1440dpi" but surely that can't be right.The printer is capable of laying down dots at that resolution. That's how it's able to reproduce so many tones and colors with its ink set. Extremely fine halftoning.
However, you may not actually be able to feed that resolution to the printer and expect to see it on paper. Obviously not with shades of gray and colors since you need multiple dots to simulate the tones and colors. Each pixel you feed the printer breaks down into a set of dots. But even with pure black and white line art, the printer driver probably scales input to 720x720 or 1440x1440 before figuring out the halftone.
Years ago, when I got my 3880, I remember testing it to try and figure out what resolution could actually be sent to the printer using B&W line art. I seem to remember seeing improvement all the way to 1440 ppi. So on pure B&W, which means one ink, the printer was able to accept/render 1440 ppi. This requires special paper, i.e. your typical office paper has a dot bleed size larger than 1/1440.
On color photographs there was no improvement beyond 720 ppi, even on sections that had a pure black line on a pure white background. Beyond that I found that
- 180 ppi was acceptable for most shots.
- 240 ppi saw a large improvement over 180 ppi.
- There was some improvement to 360 ppi, but you really had to look for it.
- On carefully crafted images you could see improvement to 720 ppi in monochromatic areas, suggesting photographs are scaled to 720 ppi before halftone. But otherwise there was nothing to see between 360 ppi and 720 ppi.
- By that time the scaling algorithms in the printer driver were already so good that hitting a multiple of the printer's resolution didn't matter. 240, 235, 245, 252 ppi etc. all came out the same.
