http://users.eecs.northwestern.edu/~pappas/papers/pappas_ist...
I have never used a laser printer that did implement anything like this, the usual halftoning sucks. Once I handcrafted a file with a 600 dpi Floyd-Steinberg image (the native resolution of the printer I hadd) and it resulted in much better results, I didn't bother calibrating the gray levels though.
Specifically, I used the ImageMagick operations "-dither FloydSteinberg -monochrome" for more contrast or "-dither FloydSteinberg -remap pattern:gray50" for more fidelity to the original image.
I was surprised that the prints were better without adjusting for gamma. If I converted the image to a linear color space before the dither operation, the print came out too dark. I'm guessing that the gamma in the non-linear color space compensated for the dot gain on the printer to cancel out the effect.
Ha, it was the same for me. I used imageworsener where I had to explicitly specify -nogamma for this effect.
An other place where wrong gamma handling accidentally works is text anti-aliasing. It turns out that for small font size the wrong handling of colorspace results in more readable text than the gamma-correct method only for dark text on light background [1]. No wonder people don't like to use light fonts on dark background (like terminals).
[1] https://www.freetype.org/freetype2/docs/text-rendering-gener...