I just noticed that this is not an Inkscape problem, but general to my printing. I have a Samsung 2850 laser printer. When i try to print lines (or, for that matter, characters, in grey, the print looks ugly. With characters in Arial, size 8, 80% grey, the printer builds lines that consists of two to three dots abreast, which from some distance looks grey, but at normal reading distance looks ugly, as espeacially the ends of lines seem "frayed".
Of course, the laser printer has no other way to print grey than as a heap of black dots. What i find astounding, is that there are only three dots per line thickness, with an 1200dpi printer. Googling for dither, raster, grey/gray (damn alternative spelling) found me nothing viable.
So my question goes out to you : Is there some special driver, some checkboxes, some anything, that makes the dither more subtle? (Maybe it is just the stright raster that makes it ugly, mayhaps a statistical dither would be the solution)
The lines currently are 1mm thick, with 3 black, and three "white" dots, on average. 600 dpi (i'm not sure whether the advertised 1200dpi are just some pr-blurb) would enable 24 dots (12 black 12 "white") - so what i essentially need is a frequency-modulated raster in lieu of an amplitude modulated one - any thoughts how to achieve this?

I think most printers have a general "quality" setting which influences DPI (lower quality, lower DPI, faster print). My printer (a HP) gives you access to the quality/DPI under Printer Preferences.

No problem with resolution - black lines look very crisp. only problem is grey - grey is produced by halftoning, and the process used is a static raster -> black dots of varying thickness in a quadratic layout, so what i need is to bring the printer to use a frequency modulation instead:
Currently 50% grey is done so: (4dot-wide dots , separated by 4dot-wide white space)
.... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ....
FM 50% would be so: (every second dot is white)
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The size of those half-tone dots should be controlled by your printers dots per inch setting. If your black lines are from a vector source (i.e. text) it will appear crisp regardless of DPI... depending on the application you print from.

to my understanding, a bigger dot is made up of little dots, and the number of such little dots that could be drawn per inch is the dpi measure. so if the printer is able to draw a 1/6mm dot, this would be possible with a 150dpi printer, as with an 1500000dpi printer. the difference being, that the printer with the higher dpi is able to draw smaller dots.
So my printer should be able to print dots 1/25mm wide, spaced 1/25 mm to make up the semblance of 50% black. What i does, is print dots 1/6mm wide, spaced 1/6mm apart. Looked at under optical magnification, one can see that it is in fact more some sort of a network, proving that the working resolution already is much higher. It is only that at some point the printer decides to make1/6mm dots from a lot of little 1/25mm dots. The question is how to alter this behaviour.
EDIT: I just tried switching between low res and high res (600 vs 1200) - it simply alters how nicely rounded the big dots look, but not the size of the dots. So what i need is some way to make the printer do grey in Frequncy modulation, not amplitude modulation - the dpi are ok
EDIT2 : Example To the left is the 1200dpi version, to the right the 600 dpi
EDIT3: On the bottom of this page, there is a nice example of what i want
EDIT4: Cool! I already found this thread in google (search: laser printer dither) on page 2! Now if we only would find a solution....

The only time when I had a similar symptom was when there was transparency, I got a popup from printer that some areas contain transparency and would possibly not print well. The case was a company logo that obviously contained transparent areas, it was in a pdf document and everything printed well except the logo, the logo was printed like dot raster, very similar to what you described.

make transparent areas opaque (if you have transparency anyway.)

I've been looking around some more, read the printer manual, and it doesn't look like this is a setting for your printer.

I wouldn't assume you'll get to choose Frequenzmodulierter Raster instead of Amplitudenmodulierter Raster--I've never seen such a setting on any laser printers I've worked with. But I though you would have been able to do something to reduce the dot sizes--they are very large. But perhaps this is a limitation of cheaper laser printer? I don't know how much they cost, I'm just guess its inexpensive from the look.

Some things to try

1. Check if different programs print grey differently
2. If you're using a PCL driver, try the PS driver or visa versa.
3. Contact the place you bought it from... if you think they might know. You could also try calling Samsung

Worst case senario is that you can take your document into a photo editor and manually convert it to a B&W bitmap with your choice of dithering, then print that. Obviously that's not a good solution if you need smaller dots on every print

loonquawl wrote:to my understanding, a bigger dot is made up of little dots, and the number of such little dots that could be drawn per inch is the dpi measure. so if the printer is able to draw a 1/6mm dot, this would be possible with a 150dpi printer, as with an 1500000dpi printer. the difference being, that the printer with the higher dpi is able to draw smaller dots.
So my printer should be able to print dots 1/25mm wide, spaced 1/25 mm to make up the semblance of 50% black. What i does, is print dots 1/6mm wide, spaced 1/6mm apart. Looked at under optical magnification, one can see that it is in fact more some sort of a network, proving that the working resolution already is much higher. It is only that at some point the printer decides to make1/6mm dots from a lot of little 1/25mm dots. The question is how to alter this behaviour.
EDIT: I just tried switching between low res and high res (600 vs 1200) - it simply alters how nicely rounded the big dots look, but not the size of the dots. So what i need is some way to make the printer do grey in Frequncy modulation, not amplitude modulation - the dpi are ok
EDIT2 : Example To the left is the 1200dpi version, to the right the 600 dpi
EDIT3: On the bottom of this page, there is a nice example of what i want
EDIT4: Cool! I already found this thread in google (search: laser printer dither) on page 2! Now if we only would find a solution....

I had the same interest and have even converted a document into a 600dpi image, converted it to B&W manually with dithering and printed the results. I noticed two things:

1. Most grey tones turn into black while near-white tones turn white. There is only a narrow band of light greys that show up as greys after fine dithering.
2. When printed as fine lines or as text, most of even these said greys that had really appeared grey when printed in a block appears either too dark, like black, or too faded.

I later read that laser printers have trouble rendering individual points
http://se.uwaterloo.ca/~dberry/COURSES/ ... one.ppt#14
(See how the "Space filling curves dithering" algorithm (14th page) clusters the black points together so that they show up in the laser printer output?)

I figure it's because in the laser printing developing process (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_printer#Developing) the electric charge on the roller works over longer distances than the pixel pitch.

Anyway, I found that other than the "space filling curves dithering" algorithm, the 1st problem can also be overcome by applying a finely tuned anti-S-curve on the image before dithering, to compress all the possible shades of grey into the narrow range that will actually appear grey in the printer output. (hint: the processed image will appear all flat with no contrast before printing.)

I don't think there is a solution to the 2nd problem. It is just how our eyes react to thin grey lines and I think it's the original reason why the printer stuck with the big black dots approach.