Text printing pixelated

[evansd2]

Yeah 225 is pretty good, but sharp eyes can pick that up at close range.

I fooled with finding some of the limits ages ago:

Practical limits of LPI in Baltic Birch

I wondered what the upper limit was to the “resolution” of wood when it comes to engraving, so I tried to test it. Lessons learned: LPI matters. All of these pictures are the same speed and power, but higher LPI definitely yields better detail and darker contrast. 225 LPI: Note the muddy details, “Case” is almost illegible. [image] 370 LPI: Clearer and crisper with darker engraving. [image] Cleaning matters. Cleaning the smoke residue from the surface will make your details much mo…

It may not be directly apples to apple for you, but it can show you some differences.

The biggest case where LPI matters is when you have something small that’s meant to be held, with an especially crisp engraving surface. Anodized aluminum is notorious for that, I was making some dog tags, higher LPIs were noticeably cleaner.

EDIT: Ah, I thought I maybe wrote that up, and sure did:

Aluminum dog tags

One quick note: I’ve since worked on settings a bit, lpi seems to matter a lot more than I would have thought. I was doing 340 but have since upped it to 600+ and the result is much better. Aluminum engraves so crisply that it was easy to see the lines at 340, 600+ gives a much smoother edge. I fooled with doing 340 engraving but then running a score of the same path to define the edges and got great results, but my specific path here had a few issues with open nodes and it was not cool. If I…