If you want to avoid blocky looking printouts you must make sure your image is the right size to print. A printer's resolution is measured in dots per inch (dpi) and lines per inch (lpi). The dpi of a printer is the number of dots that are printed across an inch of printout. Most modern inkjet or laser printers have a dpi of 300dpi or more. The lpi is the number of lines of dots to the inch, usually this figure is the same as the dpi figure, but it can vary (eg. printers, which have 600 dots per inch but only 300 lines per inch).
If you want to print out an image at best possible quality and avoiding blocky images, make sure that your image is at least the same size as the size you want it to appear on paper. For example, if you are printing to a 300dpi x 300lpi laser printer, and you want to create an image that is 6 inches wide by 3 inches deep, you must create an image that is 1800 (300x6) pixels by 900 (300x3) pixels wide! Most colour printers do not support all 16 million available colours directly, and they have to dither an image (by mixing dots of different colours to approximate the colour you want). Because this means they are not accurately representing the image this does allow you to work at slightly lower resolutions (half the resolution previously calculated, eg, 900 x 450, is usually adequate). As with everything, it is best to experiment with different image sizes printed with different options until you find a combination you like.
If you are providing artwork which is to be used for professional print (eg, for books, magazines, etc) there is one further concern. Traditional printing uses a system called halftoning. This involves breaking up the image into a variety of overlapping cyan, magenta, yellow and black dots. Look at a colour photograph in a newspaper close up to see these dots. To get the best possible quality from a halftone system it is preferable to generate your image between 1.5 and 2 times the size you would calculate from the lpi figure quoted by your printers. If you have an existing image that you wish to print at better quality, then the only way to improve on blocky output is to use the Photogenics 'Scale' function with Smoothing enabled. Scaling the image to a larger size (try 200% or 400%) will remove some of the blockiness, but at a cost. Any image that is scaled will blur losing detail (the more the image is scaled the worse the bluring). There is no way around this, other than editing the image by hand to clear up parts of the image before printing.
9-pin and 24-pin dot matrix printers (mono or colour) are not capable of printing photo realistic images and are not recommended for use with Photogenics. Colour inkjet owners (HP Deskjet, Canon BubbleJet, Epson Stylus, etc) need to ensure that they are using the special coated papers that are sold for their printers. These will give more accurate images and can help to lessen visible banding. Also, some cheap refill inks are not of as high quality as the official colour inks supplied by the manafacturer, and output using these inks may be substandard.
The standard printer system supplied with Photogenics uses Amiga Preferences printer drivers. While the Preferences system is supported by most printers and most printers come with a driver suitable for use with this, it has severe limitations when it comes to printing high quality images. As it was designed for the original Amiga computers, it is only capableof printing 4096 colours (or 12-bit colour), compared to the16 million colour (24-bit) images that Photogenics works with. On grey scale images the Preferences drivers support 16 shades of grey, the Amiga supports 256. Although Photogenics does pre-print 12-bit dithering to try and maximise the quality of your output, it is still held back by the Preferences limitations. To print at the best quality your printer can handle, you need a totally new printer system that does not use the Amiga Preferences drivers. Wolf Faust has developed and published such a system - Studio II. Available separately from Almathera, it provides significant improvements over the standard Preferences system. Firstly, it sends full 24-bit (or 256 shades of grey) data to your printer, allowing your printer to create a better quality image. Secondly, it includes a professional colour management system. Normally, colour printers will output different colours to the colours you see on the screen and expect to get. With a colour management system the computer can compensate for the difference between the colours the printer outputs and the colours you were expecting, giving you much better, more natural, printout. Studio II is a stand-alone package which can print images from a variety of sources, but it can also be controlled directly from Photogenics (use the 'Print/Via Studio II' menu item).
We now, with version 2 of Photogenics, support another 24-bit printer system, TurboPrint from Irsee Software. Like Studio II this offers excellent print quality on supported 24-bit devices, and it can be controlled directly from the Photogenics 'Print' menu in a similar manner.