Halftone, the printed reproduction of a photograph or other illustration as a set of tiny, evenly spaced spots of variable diameter that, when printed, visually blur together to appear as shades of gray. Many printers used in desktop publishing, notably laser printers and digital imagesetters, are able to print halftone images. In traditional publishing, halftones are created by photographing an image through a meshlike screen; the darker the shade at a particular point in the image, the larger the spot in the resulting photograph. In desktop publishing, halftone spots are created electronically by mapping each gray level onto a collection of dots (called a spot) printed by the laser printer or imagesetter.