... For some reason the smaller lower end printers often can print a smaller droplet, and additionally have a higher droplet “resolution”, example the R3000 is also 2pl droplet size and resolution is listed as 5760 x 1440 dpi. I have no answer as to why, but it certainly doesn’t seem to affect the quality of the finished prints.
It is most likely an engineering trade-off. A smaller printer makes smaller prints. You can deliver smaller drops and still build the image in a reasonable time. As the size of the print goes up, the patience of the customer will go down if print times become excessive. Given a finite number of nozzles, use bigger drops for a higher volume of ink flow, and the speed of the printer goes up to offset the time needed to cover the larger print area.
As for drop sizes and image quality, this topic does becomes more academic very quickly, but it fascinates me. The often cited argument is that if you can't see the dot structure at normal viewing distances, then why bother making finer dots? Well, it hinges on eye-brain visual stimuli that are hard to quantify. While we can say that people with 20-20 vision and good near distance focusing (i.e., young folks who don't need reading glasses
) are going to be able to resolve approximately 5 to 6 line pairs per mm in the image plane, it's well known that photographic prints with even higher resolution are perceived to be of finer quality. The micro structural details lying just out of our immediate zone of visual acuity, also contribute to one's sense of image sharpness (this is Fourier Transform mathematics). We could have a very protracted discussion here, but consider a case well known to many photographers from the film era. Contact prints from large format negatives look sharper yet smoother tonally than enlarged prints from the same negative, even when the enlargement is kept to only very low power (e.g. 2x-4x enlargement) from a large format negative in a diffusion head enlarger such that the final print still out resolves extra high frequency details well above that 6 lp/mm visual resolution limit on the print surface.
Also, consider how many old photographs are now being repurposed today. We are scanning them at high resolution to make new copies, and because a hardcopy print is often the only remaining example of a treasured image (I'll bet the digital era isn't going to completely eliminate that reality) and we often want to enlarge the image in the new copy print, microstructure detail in the original print becomes a very relevant factor as to how good the copy print is going to look. Any printer that can produce a finer micro structural detail, more free of dot structure or graininess per unit area of printed image, is going to yield a print with superior copy/enlargement capabilities. That's a big deal to archivists and historians.
You can get some sense of this value in better micro structure in an inkjet print from an article I wrote quite a while ago regarding the Fuji Drylab printers. You will find it here:
http://www.aardenburg-imaging.com/news.47.htmlcheers,
Mark
