Hi All,

I'm experiencing poor printing quality when printing enroute charts on my HP Color LaserJet CM1312.

While the generic chart details and the orographic data are printed correctly with colors corresponding to the screen preview, the airspaces whose lower limit corresponds to ground level, the airspace boundaries in general and the planned route path are printed with ugly dithered colors that are quite different (very saturated) from the colors seen on screen, and because of this strange dithering they limit the readability of the covered symbols and words in the chart.

I've made lot of trials, tweaking all known printer settings related to colors and color management (including color management assigned to the host system, then to the printer, then completely disabled), but the printing quality seems to be totally unaffected by these settings. On the other side, any other document produced by the Print Centre is totally OK.

I will try to post a photo of the output print as soon as I manage to upload the image somewhere (I've lost my Imageshack password and I'm waiting to receive the password reset email )

Am I missing something? Is there anybody who uses the same (or similar) printer and managed to get an acceptable printing quality?

Thanks a lot in advance for any advice!

EDIT: here is what I get from my printer, notice the dithered and saturated colors used to render airspaces, boundaries and planned route:



Best regards,
Filippo

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Filippo1974
PPL(A) holder - CPL + IR + MEP in progress
Senior specialist in throwing Italian ATS units into panic every weekend.

I'm using an Epson PhotoPX720WD and have just printed off a zoomed in and zoomed out copy of the chart.

I used bog standard photcopy paper.

The colours, text, and route are good. The underlying features below the ATZ's do take on a deeper colour but that's to be expected when there is another colour above it, but it isn't to it's detriment.

All in all, it's a good usable representation of the chart.

Well, my only doubt was why only some specific elements of the chart are rendered with dithered, saturated colors, while all the others correspond exactly to what I see on screen.

I wondered if such elements are drawn in a particular way, so that the printer renders them differently from any other element in the chart.

Of course this is not a show-stopper, I just wanted to share my experience with others to see if anyone can give me advices to optimize the configuration of the printer.

Regards,
Filippo

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Filippo1974
PPL(A) holder - CPL + IR + MEP in progress
Senior specialist in throwing Italian ATS units into panic every weekend.

I've seen dithered output from one of my printers too. To date, I haven't worked out why this is, or whether I can do anything about it.

As we have normally have colour printers at home, you will not find them in the average briefing room. Printing the PLOG on black and white printers creates a difficult to read one, especially the first column. I propose to have an option to be able to print a gray PLOG where the waypoints are in normal font type. So no colour and no different font sizes. I tried to print the HTML option and the result is much better.