Illustrator Printing Quality Issues with Xerox Phaser 6510DN

[obharucha]

Hi,

I'm having some problems printing on a new Xerox Phaser 6510dn laser printer.

The printout is made up of visible diagonal lines across the image.

I dont think its a hardware fault since other software like MS Word and the printer Test Page print files perfectly.

The 'Device Name' text on the image is much smaller than the 'Entrance 2' text on the other image.

The printer has a resolution that can print Up to 1200 x 2400 dpi.

I'm using MacOS High Sierra on 10.13.4 / The Printer Driver is 4.17.1 / and the printer firmware is 1.30.6

I haven't had this issue before with other printers but it may be because its a higher resolution printer.

Any ideas why this might be and how can I fix this?

Many thanks.

[Monika Gause]

That's the result of screening.

You might be used to diffusion dithering printing which is typically done by inkjet printers, but this thing is a completely different technique.

Which printer resolution is set up in "Output"?

It might be possible that it can be incresed. If not, then that's that.

[obharucha]

Thanks for the response. I'm actually not able to select anything from Printer Resolution under Output. Its showing blank and if I try to type anything, Illustrator instantly crashes. Is there usually something under this dropdown? Thanks

[Monika Gause · Accepted solution]

Then you're stuck.

You could ask Xerox what to do.

The black printout works, because it's 100% black.

[codeshot]

This is the printer's native halftone mechanism. For postscript printing it defaults to HalftoneMode 1 which means the printer has an algorithm to choose a halftone method. It might be possible for you to choose to allow the application to choose the halftone method (those greyed-out Document Link options, Frequency, Angle, Spot function) however, when I set a custom halftone mask the printer will not print it above 600dpi - it ignores /HWResolution settings even for its advertised native resolution of [1200 2400]. Only glyph and line edges seem to be higher resolution and that means the usable halftone Frequency and Angle might be so limited in variety that you can't get a better result.

Perhaps you will be able to select from one of the 112 or 113 builtin halftone methods instead, I haven't got as far as trying them yet, DefaultHalftone S000 S001 ... S108 XFI XSF XUF.

Another user in these forums talked to the Phaser 6510 development team (that team thought the halftoning looks fine even though the customer was disappointed in comparison to other printers). Circle line-art has big sections missing where the lines that should be drawn are between the halftone screen lines the development team delivered! It looks terrible. I'm hoping I can figure out how to set the various builtin halftones and that I find a more generally useful one than their 'DefaultHalftone' which is what I assume is being used.

[codeshot]

I just tried adding this to the start of a postscript file (.ps) and printing it with `lpr -l`on Linux (xeroxprint should function mostly the same).

<< /HalftoneMode 0 >> setuserparams

/S001 /Halftone findresource sethalftone

I get a much finer pattern. Maybe adding << /PostRenderingEnhance true >> setpagedevice will also improve the results, and perhaps there are things that can be set in PostRenderingEnhanceDetails too.

Interestingly the S001 halftone makes it look like the smallest (nonaddressable, unfortunately) dot is smaller than 1200x2400. It's hard to say. The famous fractal fern seems like it prints with smaller dots even though that's regular postscript line art.

[codeshot]

Some of these halftones are *way* off S003 seems to be lighter than it should be while S004 seems to be waaay darker than it should