Deskjet
Kirk,
I'm always glad to help any way I can. But….
From your message, maybe you misunderstood me. When I complained of not so
great print quality, that had NOTHING to do with the DJ printer itself,
rather it's from the not-so-great quality printer drivers that the Amiga
uses. True, version 1.3 drivers are better, but I don't think they give
you quite the quality that is available on a Mac or even IBM at times. If
you were to hook up a LaserJet to the Amiga your printouts would be almost
exactly the same as the DJ (with decent paper in the DJ I honestly think
you wouldn't be able to tell the difference!).
This is not something that is going to change very rapidly, however. Since
the Amiga printer drivers (and 99% of the Amy's programs) work directly
from and on the screen memory. That memory is only as sharp as the
resolution of the screen which is about 75 dpi. In order to change 75 dpi
into 300 dpi a lot of trickery has to go on, mainly smoothing and
enlarging. Since the programs are so "stuck" on this format, I don't
foresee this situation changing in the near future. It seems that the v
1.3 drivers are as good as we will ever see on the Amiga, for a while.
One Note:
I have read about and talked to C Ltd. regarding their newest product – a
laser printer/scanner/software combination that uses a 300 dpi screen
bitmap, yes that's a 2,400 wide by 3,300 long bitmap (letter size) in the
Amiga's memory. It takes about 1.5 meg to do, but the results are
tremendous. With a special version of Publishing Partner Professional,
Express Paint, and some other graphics orientet software, you can directly
edit that bitmap, thus giving you control over a 300dpi page. It's
exciting, unfortunately there is no current word processing software to
handle this 'virtual page' and C Ltd. is keeping the print technology for
themselves for use on their laser printer (prints a page in 8 seconds). I
can't blame them, though. They have however placed the virtual page
libraries into the public domain for software authors to use in future
programs. I am told that since the Amiga can access up to 8.5 megs of
memory at once (cleanly) it is the only computer that can handle such a
large bitmap. Ahhh, only Amiga makes it possible!
As you can see until this technology becomes used on a wider scale, we will
be stuck with 75-100 dpi screen resolution in our printouts.
Well, again that's a long answer to a simple question and I apologize for
running up your CIS bill when reading these messages.
Anyway, Good Luck.