The VioVio Vivisection

Ok, I admit I’m starting to obsess over this. But I had to get to the bottom of it. I realized that if I was going to compare the output from the inkjet with the various SoFoBoMo POD examples I’d be receiving I’d have to do it with a little more rigor. So, forget the loupe. I made an inkjet print on my HP9180 and scanned it at 2400 dpi. I then scanned the book image also at 2400 dpi. Both the inkjet print and the book images were printed from the same file at the same size and resolution (300 ppi). Thus, I’m oversampling at around 8X. I then took a 1200×1200 crop from each and then downsampled those to 600×600. This gives a decent size image for the web, while still showing the basic structure of the print at a 50% view.

Here then are the results. [Drum roll …] First, the HP9180 print:

Then, the VioVio print:

I mean, it’s night and day. I’ll grant you that at this magnification it’s very different from looking at the prints with the naked eye, but this really explains everything about why the VioVio images look so “rough”. And, yes, I know that I should expect better output from the inkjet.

But, my question still is: did VioVio print this correctly, according to the best resolution that their printer could do?

I would love it if someone could repeat this experiment with their SoFoBoMo book from, say, viovio, mypublisher, blurb, shared ink, etc.