We demonstrated that polycrystalline cesium iodide (CsI) on large area Ni/Au coated printed board provides a quantum efficiency (QE) higher by a factor of 2 than the films deposited on the standard Cu/Au printed circuits. This is the most important result of the present systematic study of the QE lateral inhomogeneity for CsI on different substrates. We found a strong correlation between the QE lateral variation and the morphological homogeneity of the films. The QE was measured by UV photoelectron emission microscopy and spatially resolved X-ray photoemission, and the morphology studies were performed by secondary electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction and scanning tunneling microscopy.