Poor highlight and shadow quality is a critical problem for traditional halftones, because most print engines have problems handling small dots. When the size of the black or white dot falls below a critical value, the technology will be unable to reproduce it (the dot will be lost on the film, plate or paper).
Many RIP manufacturers use so-called hybrid techniques to overcome this problem: under a certain percentage, the screening will start to act as an FM screen – instead of decreasing the size of the dots, they will be removed. Technically, this is the same grey enhancement technique that they use for increasing the number of shades. However, for the human eye it is more offensive to see regular patterns in these areas than anywhere else (as the difference between an existing and a missing dot is more obvious than the difference between a smaller and a bigger dot). Thus the hybrid screening solutions of many RIPs become unpleasant if the minimum allowable dot size increases over 2-3%.
The innovation of the technique StudioRIP uses to avoid this problem is that instead of using an ordered pattern, a stochastic approach is used, avoiding any disturbing patterns.
Another important feature of StudioRIP’s hybrid screening is that the printable minimum and maximum dot sizes can be set up by the user.
