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Atkinson Dithering (2021)


When the Macintosh was released in 1984, it featured a square-pixeled black-and-white display at a crisp 72 dots per inch. The 512x342 resolution might seem less than impressive today, but for the time it was a pleasantly high-resolution consumer-grade computer.

Among other things, the monospaced Monaco 9pt bitmap font featured characters that were 6 pixels wide, allowing the Macintosh to render a standard 80-column terminal with ample room for a vertical scrollbar and other niceties. If we wanted to avoid modifying pixels in-place, we could observe that the accumulated error we care about would fit in a fixed-size circular buffer ( e) proportional to the width of our image. Compared side-by-side with Floyd-Steinberg dithering, Atkinson’s algorithm seems to produce richer contrast, at the cost of some detail in very light or dark areas of the image.

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Atkinson Dithering