Automated Measurement of Printer Effective Addressability

摘要

When evaluating printer resolution, addressability is a key consideration. Addressability defines the maximum number of spots or samples within a given distance, independent of the size of the spots when printed. Effective addressability is the addressability demonstrated by the final, printed output. It is the minimum displacement possible between the centers of printed objects.In this paper, we present a measurement procedure for effective addressability that offers an automated way to experimentally determine the addressability of the printed output. It requires printing, scanning, and measuring a test target.The effective addressability test target contains two types of elements, repeated to fill the page: fiducial lines and line segments. The fiducial lines serve as a relative reference for the incremental displacements of the individual line segments, providing a way to tolerate larger-scale physical distortions in the printer. An ordinary reflection scanner captures the printed test target. By rotating the page on the scanner, it is possible to measure effective addressability well beyond the scanner's sampling resolution. The measurement algorithm computes the distribution of incremental displacements, forming either a unimodal or bimodal histogram. In the latter case, the mean of the second (non-zero) peak indicates the effective addressability. In the former case, the printer successfully rendered the target's resolution, requiring another iteration of the procedure after increasing the resolution of the test target. The algorithm automatically estimates whether the histogram is unimodal or bimodal and computes parameters describing the quality of the measured histogram. Several experiments have refined the test target and measurement procedure, including two round-robin evaluations by the ISO WG4 committee. Results include an analysis of approximately 150 printed samples. The effective addressability attribute and measurement procedure are included in ISO/IEC TS 29112, a technical specification that describes the objective measurement of printer resolution for monochrome electrophotographic printers.