A novel halftoning approach that has embedded in it a model for the electrophotographic process is presented. Models for the laser beam, exposure of the organic photoconductor, and the resulting absorptance on the paper are embedded into the direct binary search (DBS) halftoning algorithm. The algorithm is applicable to any arbitrary pixel modulation scheme and is also highly portable between different electrophotographic print engines. Computational issues are addressed to make the approach viable. Results show good exploitation of pixel modulation and improvement over DBS with no printer model throughout most of the tone scale.