Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mandrill!neoucom!wtm
From: wtm@neoucom.UUCP (Bill Mayhew)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Addendum to my "review" of the HP Desk Jet printer
Keywords: things it doesn't do
Message-ID: <1184@neoucom.UUCP>
Date: 18 May 88 13:59:31 GMT
Organization: Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine
Lines: 62

Hi,

I just wanted to add a couple of extra things to the discussion of
the HP Desk Jet printer that I posted last week.  Here are a couple
of additional things I've noticed.

1.  There are a number of extensions for margin control that the
manual notes "are not a feature of level III PCL".

2.  There are three methods for downloading a raster image.  One is
to just load the bit pattern.  The second lets a repeat pattern be
downloaded.  The third permits a mix of image and repeats.  There
are also a couple of not a feature of level III PCL escape
sequences for setting the right margin of the raster area, etc.

3.  There are apparently no macros available, as can be found in
the Laser Jet PCL.

4.  The <Esc> * c line drawing, gray fill and predefined patterns
are not available on the Desk Jet.  Boo!  I miss them.  I can
understand why, though.  It would be a little tough to support the
<Esc> & a cursor positioning stuff and have to roll the paper
backwards all over the place.  Since it takes a couple of seconds
for the ink to dry, you'd risk getting ink all over the paper feed
pinch rollers and hence all over your paper too.  Of course, if the
Desk Jet had a megabyte of RAM, then it could compose the image
before printing... but then it would need to have a higher
horsepower CPU and that RAM costs $$$ these days; simply not
compatible with the idea of a relatively inexpensive printer.  By
the way, the Desk Jet's CPU appears to be a Z8 running at 4.00 MHz.
There is one large gate array on the control PC board and two large
chips on a smaller PC board near the printhead, so there may
actaulay be more processing power ther than just the Z8.

5.  <Esc> & a is supported for TEXT printing, however.  Goodie!
Seems to take quite a while (10-15 seconds) mulling over a page
with about 150 such cursor positioning sequences before printing
starts, though.  I really can't gripe, since I don't know of any
outher inexpensive printer that has this feature.

6.  The owner's manual fails to mention the escape sequence
incantations that are necessary to download a font.  It also fails
to mention how one would design one's own font/typeface.  One would
hope that this is not considered proprietary.  No mention is made as
to whether downloadable fonts are compatible with those of the
Laser Jet; that would be nice!  A 128K (a least) expansion
cartridge is needed before you can think about downloading fonts.
There are slots for two cartidges of either RAM or fonts.


I just wanted to pass the above additions along to augment my
original comments.  I also want to mention that the Desk Jet really
is a pretty good value versus expense.  With street prices just a
little over $600, the Desk Jet provides very serious competetion
for the middle range of 24 pin printers.  I should also mention
that I was pretty skeptical about the Desk Jet at first since I was
familiar with the pretty terrible output from the Thinkjet printer.
The Desk Jet delivers fine quality output on ordinary copier or
letterhead bond paper.

--Bill
  wtm@neoucom.UUCP