Reply To: Artifacts, pdfs and printing

My initial guess is that the printer has an old RIP and doesn't even know that in the 21st century much of the banding problems have been solved by in-rip dithering software. It's never going to be perfect, but this just doesn't come up as much. It's like people who say InDesign's pdfs are bad because they can't get CID fonts to print. The problem is not InDesign, it's the printer's RIP. I would try to find a printer that can accept PDF/X-4 files (using a rip that can actually print PDF files) if possible.