[Foebane]

I have looked at computer games magazines since I was around 10 years old, and back then I was familiar with the usual screenshots printed in magazine articles, where they simply took a photographic camera and pointed it at the computer monitor without a flash, took the picture and processed it like any other. The obvious thing was that that even if the picture was in black and white (to cut down on developing costs) the phosphor dots and scanlines, and even the bulge of the screen were often noticeable, and it was an accurate way of doing it at the time.

Then, some time later, I got my Amiga 500 and started looking at the platform's magazines, like Amiga Format, CU Amiga, Amiga Computing, Amiga Action and a whole host of others. Some, like Amiga Action, still used conventional photography for the screenshots, but I noticed that all the magazines by Future Publishing used a new method of reproducing images.

With this new method, the pictures looked cleaner, better (for the most part) and were free of phosphor dots and scanlines and tube bulges. The clarity of the pictures (for the most part) were so good, that you could achieve the same results by using WinUAE today and then printing them out on your inkjet. Basically, all you saw were the pixels themselves and no "filters", so to speak.

As time went on, I saw the same process appear in all computer magazines and it became the standard, and a lot of AGA and MS-DOS screenshots looked gorgeous with their pure subtly-shaded pixel and palette gradations, and modern PC games of the last 20 years really show off the capture technique used.

Except, there was a problem with the Future Amiga magazines: their image capture was broken.

You could see it in many of the printed images of screenshots, the colours looked off or skewed in some way in portions of the images, and sometimes it got so bad you could see "borders" between the pixels between certain shades of colour. I found it really annoying that it only happened in their magazines, but I never wrote a letter of complaint, as I wouldn't know how to describe the problem, but I'm sure that others must've known about it and did complain to Future. I don't recall reading any such letter.

I don't have any of the Amiga magazines (or ANY magazines) now, since I sold them all in an eBay batch back in the day, but if I did, I could take a picture of one of the images so you could see what I'm describing.

What I will say is that I liked the look of pure pixels on paper so much, I decided to never use fancy CRT filters on WinUAE or any other emulator.

What I'd like to know is, what the name of the process to take an image from the Amiga (or PC or whatever) and reproduce it accurately (most of the time) in print, without a photographic camera in sight?