OSDev.org

This concerns making a printing API. What are the capabilities of shades-of-color/greyscale of the current printing technologies? (I think these are current: inkjet, lazer, color-lazer. Let me know of others please.)

I'm particularly concerned whether the technology requires dithering to achieve shades of color. Or does the technology allow full range of color/greyscale at the highest resolution.

All printing technologies (at least all the common ones) print dots of only a very limited number of colours (although those dots can be extremely small). In the case of a non-colour printer these will be black dots only (although you could consider the spaces to be non-printed white dots). So almost all printers use dithering rather than producing a continuous grey-scale.

Slightly more complicated with a colour principle, but still discrete dots of a few basic colours.

The one exception that I can think of are dye-sublimation printers, which can produce continuously varying tones. I'm not sure how well they cope with black-and-white (or grey-scales); they are normally used for photo-printing.