printed background doesn't look like on screen background

[pet3004]

I am trying to print a background that should look like light shining through
a dark blue background, but when I print it out it looks like a checkerboard.
I tried one before that should have looked like a blue gradient but printed
out as light and dark blue stripes.

 

[CyberTaz]

The images you're using may be fine for on-screen display, but they are
evidently very low resolution & limited in the number of colors they contain
(probably gifs, bmps, pngs). Another factor is if the actual print
dimensions are smaller than the paper size & the images are being
'stretched' to fit the page as a background. That's why you're getting the
huge pixels in the first case & the banding in the second case. These are
just a couple of possibilities, there are others too.

Images need to be higher quality for print purposes (tif, jpg?, eps) & sized
appropriately before being used in most any other type of file. The best
possible scenario is that inserting it into Word won't make it any worse
than it was to start with, but it definitely won't be made any better. Any
changes made to the image will most likely cause it to not print well.