Aliasing on print vs. Windows Picture Viewer (Windows 7)

[Sim]

Hello,

I tried to find the answer by myself but can't seem to find the option. I'm doing some quality printing comparison tests by printing contact sheets, 2 x 2 to have 4 pictures per letter page using pictures in the Windows 7 sample gallery (the tulips one).
That picture is 1024x768 so I set the picture size to 1024x768 to have a full size picture, with default 4 and 16 pixel margins.

My problem is that XnView create aliasing on the tulip stem. When I print the same picture using Windows Picture Viewer in Windows 7 with default settings, there's no aliasing on the tulip stem.

I checked the original picture to see if there was aliasing in it, because Windows might have a default antialiasing filter in Windows Picture Viewer, but no, the original picture as no aliasing at all. When I check the original picture either with XnView or with Paint, the stem is real clear, fluid, with no aliasing.

So does XnView create that aliasing, maybe due to a suboptimal "adapt to page" algorithm when in contact sheet mode ? Or there's a setting somewhere that I forgot to set ?

I want to ditch ACDSee for XnView (because I also need to have some text at the bottom of each picture) but that quality loss is annoying me. Since the default Windows Picture Viewer in Windows 7 that allows contact sheet printing doesn't have that quality loss, maybe it's something I'm missing ?

Especially when I check the picture in XnView, not in contact sheet mode, the picture is really clear. So it seems to be a contact sheet mode problem ?

Thank you very much !
Sim

[Sim]

Well I think I just answered myself by testing more. Sorry for the newbie question !

I used 2048x1536 for contact sheet size and it removed the antialiasing.

I was using a really large picture image size 3000x2320 pixels but the pictures were small with huge margins, lots of lost space, it was ugly, and I read somewhere that you needed to use the picture size as the contact sheet size.

What's the best settings ? Do I need to take into account the margins ? Should I do for example 16 + 768 + 4 + 768 + 16 for height and 16 + 1024 + 4 + 1024 + 16 for length ?

[xnview]

What's the best settings ? Do I need to take into account the margins ? Should I do for example 16 + 768 + 4 + 768 + 16 for height and 16 + 1024 + 4 + 1024 + 16 for length ?

yes add margins