Typophile

1200x1200 dpi vs. 2400x600 dpi

Christian R Szabo0 votes

My Laserjet P2015 does 1200x1200 dpi. The text looks very crisp and clean.

I'm testing a Brother HL 2170w (non-PostScript), which costs far less than my Laserjet, yet it boasts an "HQ2400" dpi of 2400x600.

Text printed in this 2400x600 mode looks quite a bit thicker and darker, but I'm not sure if that's a good thing. Frankly, I think this 2400x600 feature is rather dubious, and I often see it on low-cost/budget lasers.

The odd thing is that the Brother's 600 dpi output looks nearly the same as my Laserjet's 1200 dpi output, although the Laserjet's text looks slightly cleaner. Mind you, OS X HP drivers have never been stellar.

What's this gimmicky 2400x600 dpi all about? I also noticed that a couple of sites seem to understand it as 600x2400.

Si_Daniels0 votes

If you print the same text in landscape and portrait is there a detectable difference between the two?

Christian R Szabo0 votes

Thanks for the reply, Simon.

It looks the same. Then again, I don't get a printer pane option to use landscape mode in Pages. It's only available through "page setup" in the actual application.

When I print a .pdf, however, I do get the option in the printer pane.

In either case, the text looks the same.

John Hudson0 votes

In my experience, printer manufacturers employ a variety of inconsistent, non-standardised voodoo arithmetic to come up with essentially meaningless descriptions of resolution. One of my favourites is 2400dpi that turns out to be 4-colour 600dpi.

The only thing to do is to get test pages printed, preferably from a document you prepare so you can directly compare results.

Christian R Szabo0 votes

Thanks for the help.

I'm sticking with my HP anyway. 1200x1200 I can understand, plus it's a PostScript printer and it seems to render text more cleanly.

I actually called Brother about this and the rep said their spec sheet (the "real" one, I guess), rates the printer at 1200x600. In any case, this is what you get for $120.

Yotam0 votes

I own an HL-2170W and I'm quite happy with it. Texts looks sharp and the wireless setup is a great feature

Arno Enslin0 votes

An a (Palatino) printed with Brother HL-2150n

The picture was taken with a microscope.

If it uses the same printing mechanism as HL-2170w, it is not too thick.

Captured from web.archive.org on 11 Sep 2019. view this capture