A method of printing dots in an area on a page using a plurality of printing passes of a printhead over the area, includes processing continuous tone data representing an image through N halftoning iterations to generate N halftone patterns of dots for the area; and printing each individual halftone pattern of the N halftone patterns during the plurality of printing passes, with each individual halftone pattern of the N halftone patterns being printed on a different printing pass of the plurality of printing passes over the area.