Printing Photos w/o grain

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I have an Encad Pro36 and we print a lot of Posters, most are Post script but some are tif files. The Post Script files are grainless but when I print the tif files they show the 300dpi. I've seen other posters from Encad 300dpi printers that do not show the grain I do. Are there tricks that these people use or how can I eliminate or smooth the grain out. Granted the images that I am using are 8x10 at 300 dpi so there is going to be grain. But what I've seen from these other posters where images that where not more than 300dpi, 8x10 size and they blue them up to 30 x 36 and they look great....

Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated,

Gary

-- Anonymous, June 10, 1999

Answers

Our current PosterShop products increase the resolution of a raster image by duplicating pixels in the horizontal and vertical directions of the image. We do not interpolate the data to smoothly transition into the neighboring pixels. We chose not to interpolate because the speed of ripping an image would dramatically be decreased. PostScript, on the other hand, is a vector language that describes how elements of the image should be rendered. This rendering always produces smooth output at the resolution of the printer. Embedded Tiff images within a PostScript file will also be "pixel duplicated" in order to blow up the image. We have seen output from competitors that have a smooth grainless look when blowing up images and we are looking into interpolation options for the user in future products and we are also looking into smoother dot patterns for future products. Currently, the only solution to your problem is to increase the dpi of your input files. Analog and digital means of interpolating an 8x10 image are available. Analog: Increase the scanner resolution for final output. Digital: Load the file into PhotoShop and use BiCubic Interpolation to increase the resolution.

-- Anonymous, July 08, 1999

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