Ultimately, engraving with vectors vs images is not much different, with a few caveats:
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Images that are simple black & white, if run in ‘Threshold’ mode, are effectively identical to a vector version, as long as the image version is high enough resolution
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Images that include shades of gray are usually run with a dithering mode, allowing them to represent other shades. If you have a shaded (gray) image, and you run it with dithering, it will likely appear lighter than a vector outline of that shape, because that wouldn’t be dithered and would run at full power
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dithering is just alternating dots, to give the illusion of shading.