In article ,
Paul wrote:
Hi,

How many shadings is available in a black
and white laserjet printer such as the
HP Laserjet 1010? For example, I'm
printing a photo that has 16 million colors.
Using the black laserjet... how many
shadings would it convert it to? 256?
1024? 50K? or 16 million shadings??

Now a color inkjet printer with separate
black and tricolor cartridge such as the
HP Deskjet 2560. How many colors would
it produce in the paper? 16 million colors?

In the early days, people like Don Lancaster published tons of stuff on
this. In short, the number depends on the resolution of the printer and
the type of pattern (arrangements of dots) used by the printer driver to
generate grayscale. There are different patterns, including random dot and
various ordered patterns, each of which has different tradeoffs with
respect to balancing the rendering of detail and of number of shades.

An inkjet printer which can regulate the amount of ink delivered by each
dot, has an advantage over laser printers which can only regulate the size
and placement.