Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. - Thomas Edison
I am not an old (white slapper but this aging whipper slapping fool wants to know if "fat" is referring to D-Max/D-Min, or or shape of dot. Even the best I have seen (for textiles) is what I refer to as a "popcorn dot" under a loupe. And they deliver spectacular results. However, I as I am shifting towards fine art and paper serigraphs this may not be acceptable for continuous tone .All that said, I am working on some translucent wet on dry images with a 10 dots per inch!
This doesn't even make sense, As illustrated below, 85 LPI on the left for a 30% black, vs 55 LPI on the right for 30% Black (from photoshop 600 DPI)Just because you make your dots smaller doesn't magically compensate for gain as the dots end up just as they are described "Per Inch"If your 55 LPI dots are gaining to be similar to the size of a 35-40 LPI dot, that means you are gaining in percentage and the 30% will be printing like a 40%-50%Now on the smaller dots, with less margin of error as the dots are closer together, your gain is going to be more extreme and that will look solid once you have gain on films and gain on pressYes you can do 80 LPI, you can do 120 LPI but you are going to have the same issues with gain except they will be more extreme in the low end and high end as you just made your margin of error smaller...
Please post photo evidence to backup the initial claim.All it said in your follow up that you are doing more linearization in a roundabout way, I think that this should be controlled at the RIP level / Photoshop dot gain control level, not a turn your dots to 85 LPI and Pray it comes out like 60 LPI, and then actually be tweaking more in the separation to compensate further for the gain you know that's going to happen.At the end of the day you are spending a lot of time chasing dots, post some prints to show that all these extra steps are worth it, and tell me how it is scalable.