Hybrid Screening, What It Will Do.

With conventional AM screening it is known that higher line rulings will render finer details. Because of the dots getting smaller, there is however the risk of losing highlights and shadows. With higher line rulings the number of AM dots increase, so the average size decreases. In the bright tones they might become that small that they can't be stable reproduced anymore. Hybrid screening can tackle this problem. When dots become too small to be reproduced, the screening algorithm automatically switches to FM screening. In this paper an overview will be given of the advantages and disadvantages of Hybrid screening. Although the algorithm will effectively counter the clipping in highlights and shadows, it might have effect on the overall image quality. Especially when the minimum reproducible dot size is rather large the FM part might look noisy. Also when using tile based screening, the replication of the tile will become visible because of the nonhomogeneity introduced by the FM part.