CompuServe Messages

Hi Bruce, I'm a little confused, so don't jump on me if I am wrong because this is a confusing subject. There are "continuous tone" printers and "half tone" printers. Most inkjets are half tone printers, including the Color Stylus. Are you saying that the Color Stylus is a continuous tone printer in Windows and a halftone printer on the Mac? Or are you saying it is storing even less information that the Windows version uses for halftoning. I mean you would tend to want 360 dpi or less to half tone print at 720, to get the full color depth etc. At least this is what books like "Real World Scanning and Halftones" etc. would have me believe, if I have read them correctly. Apologies if I haven't. But if you, and Epson are talking about the "new driver" 1.20e or 1.20a or whatever they decide to finally call it, (and I believe I have uploaded three different versions of the driver from Cserve in the past month or so), I am very annoyed with it. It's problems seem very typical of Epson and its attitude towards the Mac community. The first version of the new 1.20a seemed to pour too much ink on my photoshop prints, so I thought Epson had decided to make the driver print darker for those people who were complaining they weren't getting "true blacks". Thus as a test, I tried the new 1.20a driver printing from Illustrator, where (with the previous driver 1.10e) I had gotten remarkable detail with Illustrator's "patterns" and elegant smooth curves, in fact the Epson 1.10e driver printed everything well in Illustrator except eps previews from Photoshop. But with the new 1.20a driver, yuck!!! My beautiful curves looked like someone had smeared them, the colors were overblown, and actual detail difference that I used to see between 720 and 360 dpi (in showing really small Illustrator patterns, for example), were now gone, seemingly covered up with too much ink. So are you telling me that Epson tried to solve the "long wait" print problem by decreasing the amount of information sent to its printer? That wouldn't surprize me. With driver 1.10e Photoshop always seemed to take the same time to spool 360 dpi pictures, regardless of the detail in the picture, and the 720 dpi pictures were consistantly longer for the printer to spool to the system folder before sending the picture to the printer. However with Illustrator, the spool times would vary more, as if the software was taking more time to rasterize a picture with more detail in both the higher and lower dpi settings. Now the spooling always seems to take nearly the same amount of time, regardless. Of course, the 1.20a driver is faster, mostly because it takes less time to spool. But to my eye, much detail has been lost to the print. So is this what you are talking about, Bruce? By the way, I tried a second version of the 1.20a driver (called 1.20e? on Cserve). This driver could not make up its "mind" to stay set on either the printer or modem port. The third and most current 1.20a driver I uploaded does seem to work, but now the 1.20a driver has a new alert for me to kill the print file it has spooled to the system folder during low ram (or tight disk space situations?). This event is typical of how Epson solves a problem. Using the earlier 1.10e driver in a similiar low ram/tight disk situation Photoshop would sometimes take a nose dive and (surprize!) I would be able to print my picture on the restart, with Photoshop out of ram, and Photoshop's virtual memory ram disk not cluttering up my hard disk, anymore. It's not the best way to get a "print later" out of the Epson driver, but it worked. I can't say it made up for crashing the system, but gee, would it have been so hard for Epson to add a "print later" spooling alternative to the new and improved driver, since the driver seemed to work well on a forced restart, anyway? Wouldn't people in low ram, or low diskspace situations be grateful to be able to safely print files that no longer had to share ram and/or disk space with memory hungry applications like Photoshop??? Instead, with the current 1.20a driver the printable "spool file" is so much garbage to Epson, and if you don't "okay" killing the file with their "alert" the kill file "alert" will return on the restart. No more "accidental" printing! Bummer. So for the forth time I have returned to driver 1.10e which came out last November. Frankly I don't trust Epson to come out with a decent driver, at this point, and I've come to think of them as "mean spirited" in how they choose to solve a problem. I'm not surprized that they choose to disfunction the "720 dpi printing" to "fix" the driver. Frankly, I'm beyond angry. Now Bruce, if you are saying that the Mac dpi has been crippled even since the earlier driver (1.10e) that is even more interesting. I guess I shall have to try networking my pictures over to the PC, to print from Matisse. Can Matisse read picts, tiffs, Illustrator eps etc.? Oh the joys of modern life! So yes, its annoying, I feel betrayed but I've spent enough time and energy in dealing with Epson, and I'm looking for a good postscript alternative to the Epson software, anyway. S.Nichols(wife) on B.Bogert's account.