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Comment by itronitron | Hacker News Reader

A lot of the research into stippling (dithering) algorithms was funded by printer companies in the 80s and 90s, and before then by Kodak.

http://hajim.rochester.edu/ece/sites/parker/assets/pdf/44%20...

Editing to add:

A reference to Robert Ulichney's author page on IEEE Explore...

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/author/37325326600

I have a copy of his book "Digital Halftoning" and recommend it.

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Nice that you posted Ulichney's author page. I am a co-author of the second paper in the list, which describes a parallelizable error diffusion algorithm with amazing image quality, developed by the first author (not me), as part of her PhD thesis.

This has not been deployed in a product however, mostly because the approach mostly taken in new products is that described in the third paper in the list, which is (part of what is) marketed as "HP pixel control", which is inherently a method for color imaging, and which also opens up many new possibilities

hmmm... the author pages for the associated co-authors also seem quite interesting :)

Oh that's interesting, and makes a lot of sense actually that printer companies were pioneers for these algorithms. Looking a bit into the first paper, we see (pp. 1924, 1928) that the blue noise mask/pattern doesn't quite reach the quality of error diffusion, which seems to be the gold standard.

It's generally interesting that these algorithms exist in versions both for fixed pixel grids and for variable dot distances of printers.

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