Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!lll-winken!uunet!mfci!hsi!burns From: burns@hsi.UUCP (Jeff Burns) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Subject: Re: HP PaintJet Summary: Brief Review of HP PaintJet Message-ID: <1100@hsi.UUCP> Date: 23 Mar 89 22:22:53 GMT References: Organization: Health Systems Intl., New Haven, CT Lines: 43 I have an PaintJet I run from my MacII. A color laser printer it's not, but it's about the best you'll find in it's price range. It is well designed and capable of crisp (180 dpi) output. A word of caution is that you need the right printer driver for it. Don't bother with the Printworks driver. I found the font resolution totally inadequate for my purposes (color overheads). I gave up totally on Printworks because of all the system crashes it created. I recently installed the Cricket Expression driver which is very slick. It uses Cricket's own "CHQ" Helvetica, Times, and Courier fonts. These are outline fonts that take full advantage of the PaintJet's resolution. A temporary drawback to Expression is that it only works w/ Cricket s/w. A more generic version is said to be forthcoming. BTW, I recently noticed that HP is marketing (perhaps even bundling) their own version of Expression. You can easily access 8 colors on the PaintJet and I've been able to do my own blending by creating 2 or 3 color patterns (in MacDrawII) to get other colors (this was with Printworks -- I haven't had a chance to do much w/Expression yet). The Expression documentation says "color output is limited to the eight standard QuickDraw colors," so blending may be tough. Printing is not particulary fast when you have a relatively complex drawing with several colors. It can take several minutes for one page. The printed colors are brilliant and the font quality is very good with Expression. I have a large project coming up where I'll be printing over a hundred graphics on the PaintJet using Cricket Presents and Expression s/w. If there's interest I'll report further on the quality of the PaintJet. I bought my PaintJet from Arch Northeast Service (PO Box 373, Wallingford, CT 06492) for $935 a year ago. Arch does mailorder and their price is right. Cricket Expression was $100 at Computer Factory and it comes with an RS-232 cable for Mac-PaintJet hookup. Good Luck. Jeff Burns Marketing Communications Health Systems International