captkevman
User
plasqalicious
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Re:stupid questions - 2005/05/06 12:42
The dots you are referring to are officially called "Benday dots", and are a side effect of the 4-color printing process (CMYK) used by just about every commercial printer.
When printing in 4 colors, each color has a "plate", which is comprised of various sized dots, depending on the content of the image and the exposure. When those 4 plates are lined up in a certain way, the 4 colors blend to fool our eyes into thinking they are seeing a whole range of colors. Each plate (and therefore each color) must be composited at a particular angle to ensure that they blend just right as a whole.
Back in the early 20th century, when the 4 color process was still in its early stages, the dots were much more pronounced, and they could easily be detected by the naked eye. Over the years, papermaking, printmaking and ink manufacturing technology have improved to a point where those dots have gotten a lot smaller and harder to detect, unless you're *really* looking for them.
This Sunday, get the newspaper with the Sunday edition comics page and look at it under a magnifying glass...you'll see the dots.
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