CompuServe Messages

I have been fortunate enough to see the 600 in action side-by-side with the DJ550C, and to be kind to HP, their printer is very old. The 600 is of a far superior design (new from the drafting table up), versus the tacked-on fixit job the 500 series has become. The only way HP can compete with this new engine is if they lighten the carriage on the 1200 series and make it affordable (read: sub-$600 street prices). The color output, when measured side-by-side with identical bitmaps (all printed from within MSWindows) is much better, the detail is finer, and the performance on plain paper is extremely high-quality (you can acheive near-coated performance with careful selection of non-coated paper), and the coated-paper performance is even better, with the support of 24-bit color maps. The major improvement over the HP, however, is in the cost per color page. With a 30% coverage (7.5% of each color) the Canon has a CPP over 50% lower than the HP, and it becomes even lower if you print single-color-dominant images. Run out of red, and replace just red, not the entire CMY cartridge. Street prices for cartridges should be in the $8-9 range, hope you've got a superstore in the vicinity. With the datasheet Canon publishes, they claim a very reasonable 19c per color page. The only drawback in the immediate future is the lack of an Amiga- specific driver and the limited availability of the printer (demand is very high, so avoid the stores with small quantities; they'll get their price, and they know it). The first wave has broken, and the beach is clear, if you need one before '94, reserve it nownownow, type bye and get to the stores! Peter