CONVENTIONAL PRINTING vs. STOCHASTIC PRINTING

Advantages of stochastic printing versus conventional printing: Continuous tone photographic reproduction Produces a larger CMYK color gamut on press Renders greater detail Eliminates moire patterns Reduces ink consumption by as much as 10% – notice the ‘pooling’ of ink in conventional dot Produces smoother gradients More consistency in color throughout pressrun Faster ink drying Conventional screening (150 lpi, 175 lpi, 200 lpi) refers to AM screens, or amplitude modulation. This refers to halftone dots that are fixed on a grid, angled in 30 degree increments (except yellow: 15 degrees) and grow in size based on tonal value. LPI = lines...

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Stochastic Printing

Stochastic printing, also called frequency modulation (FM) screening, uses small (10, 20 or 25 Micron), same size dots in a random pattern and varies the density of the dot to create an image that is closer to continuous tone. In the reproduction of an image, we scan a continuous tone original photograph. The scan results in light striking a photosensitive device which issues a number that digitally represents the tonality of the original image. Printing a halftone image on paper requires that this number be passed to a computer, which stores a grid of numbers in a rectangular matrix representing the original image in digital form. To convert...

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