Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!maytag!watdcsu!mgardi From: mgardi@watdcsu.waterloo.edu (M.Gardi - ICR) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: HP Paintjet Colour printer and Amiga (LONG) Message-ID: <6099@watdcsu.waterloo.edu> Date: 15 Jul 89 05:23:07 GMT Reply-To: mgardi@watdcsu.waterloo.edu (M.Gardi - ICR) Organization: U. of Waterloo, Ontario Lines: 95 Well, we just got an HP Paintjet colour printer in at work to reduce the cost of colour output. We were using a Tektronix 4693D but at almost $4 Canadian a page, the costs were getting out of line. Knowing that I had a driver for this puppy on my extra's disk, I asked if I could take it home for the weekend. First some specs, for those not familiar with the printer. It's an inkjet using cartridges very similar in appearance to the HP Deskjet series. It uses 2 cartridges, which sit side by side. One cartridge is black ink only, the other is yellow, magenta and cyan. Life expectancy of the cartridges is as follows: * Black text (1000 chars/page) 1100 Pages * Colour graphics with moderate (10-15%) solid area fill 180 Pages * Colour graphics with solid background in one colour 50 Pages There are two internal fonts. At 10 cpi it's Courier; at 12 or 18 cpi it's Letter Gothic. The printer has the capability of printing raster images at either 180 or 90 dpi in both the horizontal or vertical direction. At 180 dpi, each bit sent to the printer causes a pixel to be represented with 1 dot. At the default 90 dpi, each bit causes a pixel to be represented with four dots. At 180 dpi, the printer is capable of printing only eight colours: black, red, green, yellow, blue, magenta, cyan and white (with white being no ink; the colour of the paper). The printer has a resident table of RGB values that it compares to the user-specified RGB values. When the printer recieves a request for a certain colour, it will select the best match to the user-specified colour from the colours it can generate. The same RGB values sent to an NTSC monitor can be sent to the printer resulting in hardcopy with the same approximate colours as the screen image. Special coated paper is provided (you get better results than regular paper) or you can print transparencies. Three interfaces are available: standard parallel, HP-1B (IEEE-488) and RS-232-C. I connected the printer up to my parallel port and immediately started Photon Paint 2. Then, I loaded up those incredible HAM-overscan images from one of the later fish disks (180-200?). You know the ones I mean; the terrific ones of racing cars, motor-cycles and jets. Anyways, I printed them and they look great! I didn't expect much with a resolution of 180 dpi (the driver only allows 180 dpi mode), but putting the picture side by side with the same picture printed on a DeskJet Plus at 300 dpi, the colour image actually looks sharper. I tried all 3 dithering schemes. F-S gave the nicest image, but the colours tended to be darker and more muted. Ordered tended to create "blotches" of colour. Halftone gave the nicest prints. Holding the page at arms length, it almost appears photographic. The colours are very true to life. Unfortunately, when I tried F-S with colour correction turned on, I met the turbaned one. Guru 3 (if I recall). If anyone else has a Paintjet, I'd appreciate knowing if they encounter the same problem. Smoothing didn't make a noticable difference with halftone dithering. Speed is good with halftone. The carriage pauses for about half a second between passes. F-S slows the carriage pause to between 2 and 3 seconds. The guys at work (real IBM noids) were knocked out. "Nice images... What'd you do these on? An Amiga? HP supply a driver for that? It comes with the computer?! Don't you need a special driver for every piece of software? Don't you need a special TSR for colour print-screens? Don't you need a special... " Well maybe that isn't an exact quote, but if you look through the provided software/hardware guide, you can see the problems that you get into if you use this printer with an MS-DOS system. It lists which software packages support which features (not all features are supported) and where you can obtain the special driver. The list goes on for 2 pages. Under Amiga it just says: "PaintJet driver will work with all software packages that run on the Amiga. The driver supports text (both internal PaintJet fonts and screen bit-map fonts) and graphics. Supports transparencies and all Amiga color modes and resolutions." A nice change from the preceeding 2 pages of excuses and footnotes. Sorry if this has taken up too much band-width, but I'm really excited about this printer. I wish I could afford one. I don't even know how much this thing costs, but I'm sure it's not that bad for what you get. I figure about $1200 US. Don't flame me if I'm wrong. Think they'll notice if I don't bring it back? ;-) Joe deSousa Mutual Life of Canada Waterloo, Ontario [C/O mgardi@watdcsu.waterloo.edu] [Please include the words "Att: Joe" in the subject line of any Email replies.]