Not exactly. While the images you send them are usually about 300-600 dpi, the halftoning is rarely done at 600 or less.

At 600 dpi, AM halftone dots are painfully visible, and even FM halftones can be distracting and lead to a defect usually called “color noise”.

I’m sorry, English is not my first language, and I may not have explained clearly.

The open printer likely prints at 1200 x 300 dpi (explained in my other comment) in color and the author of the article just reported it as 1200.

There is no was they can achieve stable cmyK prints at 1200 dpi, but only 600 dpi with just the K.

Therefore your printer is likely 16X more precise than the open one. This is quite important as inkjet printing is meant for high quality prints as it’s both slow and expensive.

Fair, and I admire them for trying. I was just pointing out that these specs are closer to a 10-15 yo laser printer, which is likely cheaper to buy and print with.

If they were producing q laser printer of similar specs with open firmware I’d be first in line to get one.

Well, your Canon Pixma is real 1200 dpi, this one on the other hand is 600 in bw and 1200 in color. Generally speaking, this is a marketing trick used by printer manufacturers to make a printer sound better and what they do is they sum the dots of each color, advertising resolutions like 4800 x 1200 dpi. This means the actual resolution is 1200 dpi but horizontally they count the dots of each CMYK channel.

My guess is they can print a stable image in bw at 600 dpi, but in color they are limited to 300 (multiplied by the 4 channels). Also my guess is that this is because they seem to be struggling with halftoning, as written in the article:

On the software side, work continues on Wi-Fi and Ethernet connectivity, as well as dithering algorithms designed to improve image quality.

Also, keep in mind dpi is not linear. Images are 2d, so a 1200 dpi print contains 4X the dots of a 600 dpi print.

… supports 600 dpi black-and-white printing and 1,200 dpi color.

Ouch. 600 DPI black and white and “1200 DPI” color resolution is very low for an inkjet.

The big missing detail remains price.

At these resolutions I’d rather get a laser printer that’s well supported in Linux no matter what the price is.