Kenoscuro,

The difference is that FreeHand provides true object-level halftone printing. Illustrator never has. The Halftone Palette in FreeHand is not a cheesy raster effect like Illustrator's Halftone Effect; it is true PostScript halftoning that can be assigned independently to individual objects. It is an invaluable feature (among many others) that has never seen the light of day in Illustrator.

You can set true custom halftoning in Illustrator, but only at the whole document level. You do it in the Print dialog at print time. Select Print. In the Print dialog's Output pane, select Separations. In the inks list at the bottom, the LPI, angles and shape settings are editable for each ink.

JET

And here's one more try everything done in Illustrator.

Drag the image from the web and drop it in Illustrator. Rasterize at Grayscale and 150 ppi. Apply the Color Halftone effect with 6 for Maximum radius and all channels at 45°. Then to view it properly File > Save for Web and Devices and in the Image Size tab change the resolution to 1000 x 750 pixels. As you can see the size of the halftone dots depends on the pixel density before applying the effect.

Regarding Illustrator's (really Photoshop's) Color Halftone Effect:

Understand: This is just a raster effect. So when you apply this filter, the result is at least an 8-bit grayscale image. Therefore, when it is printed, it will be halftoned "again" (that is, actually halftoned) by the printing RIP. Even if you rasterize the fake halftone to 1-bit color depth, the result is not going to neatly correspond to the printer spots of the printer, and the shapes of the dots will be jagged, not neatly shaped at the resolution of the output device, as would be a real halftone. So merely evaluating screenshots of Color Halftone Effect in Illustrator is not indicative of printed results, because that grayscale image itself still hasn't been halftoned.

Also, the effect does not really even act like a true photographic (or PostScript) halftone. A true printed halftone is not simply differently-sized round dots. In the highligh areas, the black dots are round. In the shadow areas, the white voids are round. The dots transition from "dot" to "void" in the midtones. (You can see this difference in the very first image posted in this thread.)

True halftoning occurs at print time. The halftone dots are properly shaped, being "built up from" the output device's actual printer spots. The result is a clean 1-bit raster of printer spots, at the actual output device's hardware resolution. This is a far cry from merely applying a "halftone" effect to a raster image.

At the very least (failing proper object-level halftoning), Illustrator's half-baked 1-bit color depth option for its Rasterize command should provide halftone sub-options for frequency, angle, and shape (and should also provide diffusion dither options). But it merely produces archaic and ugly patterned toning, pretty much rendering its 1-bit option useless.

JET