How do you print a frame to look as good as it does on screen?

[johnharlin]

During watching a video, I made a snapshot of a frame, which of course you can do with almost any video player. I then printed out the frame which did not come out very well. I was hoping that it would come out as good as it looks on screen but it doesn't even come close. There are a lot of very small details in the frame and they all come out blurred. It didn't help to bring the dpi up to 300 either. I absolutely know that someone somewhere must have made a print out of a video frame and someone somewhere might have figured out how to get the print out to come out looking as good as it looks on screen.

I printed the frame out on a hp 4200 black and white laser printer which I think gets 600 by 600 dpi. The film clip is black and white and the size is 368 x 480. I also used unsharp mask on it in Photoshop about 100 percent but though that sharpened it on screen a little, it didn't really do much for the print.

[edDV]

I get excellent results with VLC screensave. It applies your selected deinterlace mode but you must apply deinterlace before you cap the frame.

There are some examples in this thread.
https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/303093-Capture-Frame-from-1080i-HD-Home-Video

[neomaine]

The printer is 600x600 dots-per-inch. A dot is a pixel. Your 368x480 picture should print in about a 1/2in by 3/4in print. To go larger you'll have to scale it up.

Here's a link that goes into more detail:

http://www.andrewdaceyphotography.com/articles/dpi/

If the player you are using is scaling it well, then I'd just use the old Ctrl+Alt+PrtScn trick. Simply pause your player, use Ctrl+ALt_PrtScn to copy the current window, paste in MS Paint, trim out the stuff you don't want. Print away! Not perfect but should get you better results than what your describing.

[jagabo]

There are a few issues involved:

1) How big was the print compared to the image on the monitor? A different size would give different apparent sharpness and detail.

2) If the image was scaled prior to printing, how was the scaling performed. Different scaling algorithms have different looks.

3) A black/white laser printer can only print two shades: black and white. A spot of toner (black) is present or not (white). Shades of gray are achieved by mixing small dots of black and white. There are many ways of doing this: halftones, ordered dither, random dither, error diffusion, etc. The printer may have settings for this that you can adjust. They may not be obviously labeled. They may simply fall under "quality" or different optimizations (text vs graphic vs photo). These options can be both in the printer driver setup applet and in the program doing the printing.

4) Given the nature of toner and the way it's applied to the paper in a laser printer small black dots placed close together will blend together into one bigger black dot. For example, a 1200 dpi checkerboard pattern may print just as black as a solid black pattern even though it should be a medium shade of gray. This has to be accounted for in the printer driver. There should be a gamma setting that helps with this.