For ink jet printing processes the ink media interaction has been described frequently in the literature. Most of the time a microscopic analysis has been done on printing results, sometimes in situ visualisation techniques have been used.In situ visualization techniques are not easily amenable for small droplet sizes, while practical printing experiments typically are done using these small dot sizes but the transient behaviour of the fundamental underlying processes has been lost in the final printout.In this paper a combination of numerical simulations and real small size impingement studies are compared with microscopic analyses of the resultant dot patterns on the receiver.The results of the microscopic analyses on individual dots can be used and compared with older data in the literature, and can be related to the theories that can describe the spreading, absorption, and evaporation phenomena, and that can explain the influence of the media design on the ultimate image quality.