Dotgain visualised

Below is a microscopic photograph of a 1200 dpi laser printer output. The printing material was ordinary photocopier paper and an area having 75% light grey was printed. As can be seen the dot-gain is only partially a literal dot-gain the other part of it is like spilling of the printing powder. Camera: Canon EOS DCS 3. No special image enhancement, crop'd to smaller size. Saved to jpg in Adobe Photoshop v 4.0 with a compression value 4.