Please forgive as I am a complete newbie at most of this. Also, I'm pretty sure this is not an Illustrator problem so much as it is probably a printer problem or a print rendering problem, but I'm hoping that someone here will know the answer nonetheless.
I have a vector image in Illustrator. I need to be able to print it very small (like about 13mm wide) and have it look decent even under some magnification.
The image looks great as a vector of course (see 1st image below).
We're printing it to a Brother MFC-9330CDW color laser printer. Specs say up to 600 x 2400 dpi.
The problem is that when we print it vast chunks of the image are missing and there are very fine unprinted (so white) lines at a 45 degree angle, repeating at a regular interval. This is best seen in the 2nd image.
In the 3rd image I have added some red lines that track the diagonals of some of the fine-line defects.
Though I authored the image in Illustrator on Windows, I then saved it to a PDF (which still looks beautiful of course - it's still a vecotor and you can zoom in and out infinitely without losing sharpness) so that I could print the file on a friend's color laser. Said friend has a Mac and does not have Illustrator, so saving it as a PDF seemed like a good plan.
Now perhaps it's possible that I am expecting too much from the laser printer, and this is the best that a 600 x 2400 dpi laser can do. I hope not.
As a separate-but-related topic, it seems that it is annoyingly common that what you have in the computer is not what ends up on the page when you print it. The 4th image is what happens when I print the image on glossy photo paper in photo mode, on my Canon MG5420 inkjet printer. The image would be great if not for all the extra dots out in the middle of what should be clear space.
It bears repeating that these images are very small. The whole logo including the text is only about 13mm wide. So obviously these are macro photos of the printed output. But surely there must be a way to print the file in a way that doesn't add a bunch of junk to the image (as in the inkjet output), or end up leaving out quite a bit of the image (as in the laser).
Like I said, I'm a newbie, so if this is something really stupid simple, or if I have failed to include some detail that anyone but an idiot would have known to include, I apologize in advance.
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