[Coco] Printing on cheap crappy printers with a CoCo was Re: Printing on a Coco with modern printers.

[Aaron Wolfe]

On Jan 11, 2014 12:14 AM, "Theodore (Alex) Evans" <alxevans at concentric.net>
wrote:
>
> On 01/10/2014 09:51 PM, Aaron Wolfe wrote:
>>
>> I totally agree that it can't be sending that much data.  I suspect they
>> use compression or some scheme that doesn't need all the bits all the
time.
>>
>> Google turns up mountains of discussion on 16 bit per channel printers
and
>> the trouble they caused when they came out some years back because
windows
>> only supported 8 bit drivers (I'm assuming this = the 24 or 48 bit
depth).
>> While the general consensus seems to be that it doesn't make a whole lot
of
>> difference in the final output, I still am not finding anyone saying ink
>> jets are 3 or 4 bpp mechanisms.  I know manufacturers like to push the
>> truth, but marketing 16 bits and implementing one seems beyond what they
>> could get away with.
>
>
> I think that those 16 bits are for the printer driver capability
considering that manufacturers usually don't give any kind of bits per dot
for printer specs most of the time (the 3-4 figure was based on a cheap
printer that used 3 or 4 colors of ink).  I know that early ink jets only
supported on size dot and the Epson you indicated is probably significantly
more flexible in this regard than most.  I dare say that the 16 bit figure
you are looking at is for the color information that the driver can handle
for input rather than the printer's output capability.

If you type "16 bit printing" into Google, you'll find no end of folks who
seem to believe it is something relevant to the printer's output.  There
are reviews from seemingly credible sources discussing the "new" (in 2008
or so) 16 bit printers, and commenting on the potential for smoother ink
gradients, etc.  I cannot judge whether they are mistaken.

> BTW, why were both of the examples you showed multifunction units rather
than printers?  Yes, I did notice that target had a grand total of one
printer on their site.

I did not intentionally select multifunctions or a particular site.  I just
took the first Google result for the searches I did in both instances.  I
searched for "inkjet bit depth" and "inkjet color per pixel" or something
similar.

Looked a bit more and Epson seems to be more forthcoming with info like how
many different sized droplets their jets can generate for each model.
This seems to be either 3 or 5 after looking through a page full of
models.  HP uses descriptions like "1200x1200, optimized 4800x1200 dpi".
Maybe they do the 4 on/off  jets equals 1 'dpi' trick?  Maybe they also
make different sized drops? It's not clear to me.

>
> I know that PCL3GUI supports compression, but that is a real printer
language rather than just raster imaging.
>
>
>
> --
> Coco mailing list
> Coco at maltedmedia.com
> http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coco