ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at some of the practical considerations involved in digital printing, such as printer distortions and provides some corrective measures that, tailored to a specific process, improve the visual quality of resulting images. The reason that many printers rely on amplitude modulated (AM) halftoning and clustered dots is that, by clustering, the patterns become resilient to the distortions of the printing process , a quality referred to as halftone robustness. The chapter also looks at the two distortions, dot-gain and dot-loss, and discusses the impact that each has on both AM and blue-noise halftoning. It shows that robustness is a quality achieved through dot clustering since these are more resilient to the distortions of the printing process. Blue-noise patterns having the highest perimeter-to-area ratio will, therefore, be the most susceptible to the distortions of overlap while clustered-dot ordered dither patterns will be the least.
