[jgneff]

I came to the same conclusion just this week. I got the best print simply by matching the density of my black and white laser printer with the black dots I wanted it to print.

Specifically, I used the ImageMagick operations "-dither FloydSteinberg -monochrome" for more contrast or "-dither FloydSteinberg -remap pattern:gray50" for more fidelity to the original image.

I was surprised that the prints were better without adjusting for gamma. If I converted the image to a linear color space before the dither operation, the print came out too dark. I'm guessing that the gamma in the non-linear color space compensated for the dot gain on the printer to cancel out the effect.

[leni536]

> I was surprised that the prints were better without adjusting for gamma.

Ha, it was the same for me. I used imageworsener where I had to explicitly specify -nogamma for this effect.

An other place where wrong gamma handling accidentally works is text anti-aliasing. It turns out that for small font size the wrong handling of colorspace results in more readable text than the gamma-correct method only for dark text on light background [1]. No wonder people don't like to use light fonts on dark background (like terminals).

[1] https://www.freetype.org/freetype2/docs/text-rendering-gener...