Remember the old joke about the kid who announced that his family had just bought a two-color TV? “Two colors?” his friends asked. “Yup,” they were told, “black and white.”
Well, your laser printer is a two-color printer: black and white. It can’t actually print the color gray. It can, however, do a reasonable job of simulating grays by the judicious placement of tiny black dots.
But you won’t even get that unless you click the Color/Grayscale button (or choose it from the pop-up menu) when you go to print. (You’ll just get a muddy blotch where the photo should be.) In all other cases, leave the setting on Black & White, which prints faster.
(On the other hand, if you’re using the LaserWriter 8 driver, leave Color/Grayscale selected all the time. There’s no speed penalty, and printouts are more predictable.)
The three printing modes
The ImageWriter’s Print dialog box offers three printing options. When in Faster mode, the print head goes across the page once per line, printing exactly one dot on the page for each dot on the screen. The resolution of the printout is 72 dots per inch.
In Best mode, the Mac creates double-resolution text (double the resolution of the screen, that is — 144 dpi). The Mac uses a clever scheme: in its head, it actually doubles the size of the text on the screen, which it then prints on the ImageWriter at half size. The result is smaller, but sharper, text, exactly like the reducing feature of a copying machine. (That’s why you’re always told to install the 24-point version of a font if you want to print at 12-point size in Best mode on an ImageWriter.) Best-mode printing requires the print head to make two passes across the page for each line. Both the computation of the half-size fonts and the two passes make Best quality printing more than twice as slow as Faster printing.
And then there’s Draft mode. It uses a crude, awful-looking, weirdly spaced, built-in font with no formatting or graphics at all — but it’s extremely fast.
