Fountain Fill causes colour banding

Hi! Im wondering if anyone can help because Ive been trying to fix this for a few days now and Im getting close to my deadline!

 

I have designed our company brochures in coreldraw 12 and found that the linear gradient fountain fill Im using for the background is causing really bad colour banding when its printed. It looks great on screen, but the banding is far too bad when printed.

 

The local print shop tried printing the pages out with the same effect. Both they and I are using colour laser printers. In my case, the printer is an HP laserjet 2550L. Not the creme de la creme by any means, but it prints out photo quality colour images in a more than adequate quality to suit our needs. Therefore I dont understand why a simple thing like a fountain fill should print out so badly. Ive tried using both the postscript and the PCL versions of the printer driver, with and without the Postscript description language file. I have also followed the advice of the documentation and adjusted the number of fountain steps etc.

 Some of the settings made a little bit of a difference, but I dont really understand the meaning of screen frequency or how that relates to the image or the resolution.

 
Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated!

 

EK
 

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  • In the full fountain fill dialogue (NOT the print dialogue for fountain
    fill) you will find a LOCK beside the steps. CLOSE THAT LOCK!!!! The
    steps will then be greyed out.

    That will lock the fountain fill steps to the final output device--IOW
    it will defer the decision until it is actually sent to a printing, film
    plate or whatever device at which time it will be optimized for that device.
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