DeskJet 550C for $449.00
28 messages in this thread
For anyone in the Philadelphia area that was planning on getting a
DeskJet 550C in the near future, A computer store called Micro Center in
St. Davids PA, is offering an unbelieveable price till tommorrow $449.00
I went in today to look at lasers and people were lined up to get them. I
asked a salesman what the deal was and he said that they were supposed to
be $635.00 but someone screwed up the signage and they were honoring what
the signs said till tommorrow (saturday). I think that it is just and
advertising ploy, they had piles and piles of them around the store <G>,
but still it is a great price.
=Rick=
BTW, I'm not associated with them in anyway, just thought I might help
someone save some $$$$.
Richard,
That's a fantastic price. I bought mine from the same store a week ago
for $639. I saw the misprint in the Phila Inquirer but it was an obvious
mistake since the description was obviously of a HP500C. I can't believe they
are honoring the typo & I wish I hadn't already bought mine.
———————————————-Don- via Whap!
If anyone's going by there tomorrow, email me with your phone number. I
will fed-ex a check to you (and an autographed copy of my book!) if you'll
pick one up for me.
I'm quite serious. Email me in the morning and I'll call and work out the
details! 🙂
..Denny
I'm sorry, I was busy on Saturday and couldn't get to the store.
Believe me it would have been a nightmare anyway. It's one of those
huge stores with a tiny parking lot. It would probably have required
carrying the box about a mile, & I'm not exagerating… I hope
someone else was able to help out. I did call my sister & told her
about it but I don't think she took advantage either.
I went there on Saturday, and found a spot just as someone was pulling
out. Yes, it was like a grocery store on a Saturday afternoon. More 550C
printers in shopping carts than computers. I did buy one. Only one to a
customer though. Sorry Denny, I was by myself.
My problem now is I can't get the black cartridge to work when calling for
black ink instead it is mixing the three colors to make black.
Chris
Chris,
My best results so far have been to import graphics into Pagestream &
print using one of the older DJ550C Pagestream drivers. The new drivers are
faster but leave horizontal streaks in graphics. I haven't found an adequate
Workbench driver for the 550C yet.
———————————————-Don- via Whap!
Don,
Try the SuperDJC2 printer driver. It is a commercial product and has given me
some excellent results. Printing is much faster as it supports HP's compressed
mode of transfer as well as superior dithering routines.
-Chas
>>Try the SuperDJC2 printer driver
Charles,
OK, how about a name, phone number and price?
Thanks,
Chris
I found this over in HPPeripherals and thought someone may be interested
in reading about the SuperDJC2 printer driver.
I am not affiliated with the product's company, nor have I purchased
and/or used this driver. It would be nice to hear from anyone who has used
it. Please provide a review of the product if possible.
Amiga + DeskJet = Super_DJC2
Software for the Bicameral Mind
The Creative Focus Super_DJC2 printer driver is for all Amiga computers
and for all Hewlett-Packard DeskJets, including the new 550C. It provides
better control over printing tasks than software costing many times more.
While the intuitive side of your brain is envisioning beautiful printouts,
here are some numbers for the analytic side:
4 selectable lightness/darkness levels
4 types of black (three composites plus true black)
3 shingling options (to control ink bleeding)
2 depletion choices (for reducing the amount of ink)
For text output you get 14 powerful extended commands for just about
everything: character set, pitch, point, typeface and softfont selection;
control over lines per inch, linewrap, textscale and print direction;
8 different text color options; relative and absolute row and column
cursor positioning; and tabsize determination.
Want to get at those internal fonts? Super_DJC2 provides Preferences and
Printer access to all the typefaces: Courier, Letter Gothic, CG Times and
Univers. Choose between letter, legal, A4 and envelope paper sizes, and
stack envelopes with the new 550C. For help with specific software
packages, you can turn off perforation skip, suppress unwanted pagefeeds,
disable the driver's color correction, or select typefaces and character
sets via font numbers.
Super_DJC2 works with all Amigas, and is compatible with AmigaDOS releases
1.3 through 3.0.
And it's for all DeskJets:
even with the Original and the new Portable your grayscale images will be
exceptional and your text control unsurpassed.
One more number: Super_DJC2 is available from Creative Focus for $50.00.
Now let the intuitive part of your mind go back to visions of gorgeous
printouts . . . .
Creative Focus
Box 580
Chenango Bridge, NY
13745-0580 USA
(607) 648-4082
[Amiga is a registered trademark of Commodore, DeskJet is a registered
trademark of Hewlett-Packard, CG Times is a trademark of Linotype AG,
Univers is a product of Agfa Corporation, and Super_DJC2 is a trademark of
Creative Focus.]
Chris
Well, to make the list complete, here is what you get with Studio in
comparison (I am the programer of Studio and because of this affiliated
with the product 😉 but maybe other Studio users here can give their
comments on Studio… at least in Europe Studio has become the most sold
DJ driver during the past months with very good reviews):
The "Studio Printer Software" is for all Amiga computers with at least WB
2.04. The drivers included are for many kinds of printers
(Epson,Nec,Star,Panasonic,Seikosha, Deskjets, Laserjet and more…).
Well, to make the thing short: Studio does all the things described in the
previous message for the SuperDJ2. But there are many things SuperDj
doesn't do in equal quality nor not at all. Studio also comes with 24 bit
IFF print software.
Because Studio does come with a real printed manual and because it is more
powerfull than SuperDJ, it costs more than $50 🙁 But people who also
think of buying TruePrint from ASDG should take a close look at Studio
because they don't need anything more….
You can get "Studio Printer Software" from MacroSystem US (313-2630095).
So here a list of things (I deleted the stuff for non Deskjet printers
included):
Studio IFF print-from-disk software
———————————–
– prints IFF ILBM pictures from disk
– does not require $&%$ MBytes memory! You can print 24 MB
pictures with a plain 1MB Amiga.
– supports most of the known IFF ILBM formats, including HAM8,
IFF24, HAM, EHB and color palettes up to 256 colors.
– Allows you to print poster size images spread over multiple
pages.
– number of copies can be defined
– Using Studio you can print 24 bit-planes of color accuracy
on a color printer (for instance DJ550C).
If you have a black and white only printer, then you can print
with 8 bit-planes of grey scale accuracy.
– multiple jobs can be defined and printed in background
(estimated print time and more will be displayed)
– ink compensation does correct ink impurities
– color adjustment (gamma, contrast, brightnes, weights,…)
– Free defineable ordered dither routines. Following ordered
dither matrices are already included:
Haltone-A, Halftone-B, Ordered-A, Ordered-B, Spiral, Horizontal,
Vertical, Bck-Brick, Fwd-Brick
– Three error diffusion dither routines:
Floyd Steinberg, Jarvis, Stucki
– Two serpentine blue noise dither routines are included:
30% random weight, 50% random weight
– ARexx Interface
– font independent user interface (KS 2.04 style)
– works with most printer drivers (non striping drivers are
supported!)
– automatic use of improved code on 68020/30/40 processors
– supports multiinterface cards
Deskjet WB drivers:
—————
– drives all Deskjet printers (including 550 with real 4-color
graphics!)
– 256 greyshades (printer drivers are normaly limited to 16!)
– color adjustment with 24 bit accuracy and 256 shades per color
component. Easy control over gamma correction, brightness,
contrast and more…
– ink compensation correcting ink impurities
– control over typeface (the "DeskPref" preferences program does
contains a database of the latest typeface base values, allowing
you to calculate a typeface family)
– total control over page size and margins, line wrap, printer
direction, quality, landscape….
– includes a nice font independent preferences program
– free definable dither routines. Allready included:
Ordered-A, Ordered-B (a adopted ordered dither curing dot gain
problems), Halftone-A, Halftone-B, Line, Spiral and more…
The defineable dither improve the output quality daramticly!!!!!!!
– mirror function for T-Shirt printings…
– timeout can be defined, avoiding this nasty "printer trouble"
requester.
– full control over shingling and depletion
– Job end signal
– arXon switchbox support
– automatic use of improved code on 68020/30/40 processors
– compressed graphic output does improve the speed (2-10times faster)
– includes very fast PageStream 2.xx driver wich also allows
control over various printer settings (depletion, shingling…)
– and many more features…
PinStudio
———
[deleted]
Laserjet-Studio
—————
[deleted]
— Wolf Faust, Am Dorfgarten 10, 6000 Frankfurt 50, Germany —
Wolf,
Thanks for the info, I will look for Studio at one of the places I do business
with, from you E-mail to me, since it is obvious that buying straight from the
distributor will cost me more than going to my usual sources for software
purchase. Actually, my only sources of Amiga purchase, since there are no C=
Amiga dealers around here.
Chris
Well, Studio V1.05 should solve all your problems: Studio provides a very
powerfull DJ550C Workbench driver, 24 Bit software and a better DJ550C
PageStream driver.
— Wolf Faust, Am Dorfgarten 10, 6000 Frankfurt 50, Germany —
Wolf,
How much is Studio in DM and where can I order it?
Pete Jones, Brussels, Belgium
flying on AutoPilot
In Beglium you can get Studio from Click! Tel:038281815 Fax:038286736
I don't know what Click! asks for it. In Germany you can only buy the
german version wich costs DM95-110 (depends on where you buy it).
— Wolf Faust, Am Dorfgarten 10, 6000 Frankfurt 50, Germany —
Wolf,
Sounds interesting. I wonder if it's available in the States.
———————————————-Don- via Whap!
Donald,
Studio is available in the U.S. from MacroSystems US. See message 95983
for the number.
Denny,
Thanks for the info on Studio. It sounds like what I need so I already
ordered one from a reseller.
———————————————-Don- via Whap!
Wolf,
Do you plan to add support for the NEW EPSON "Stylus 800" ink jet
printer ? I have my eye on one of thses but Without an AMIGA driver I
don't think it will be very useful to me! The spec. sheet shows that it
has Epson ESC/P2 emulation what ever that is. This printer also supports
scalable fonts, another option that would be nice to have in an AMIGA
driver. Your product sounds very good, hpefully you will be keeping up and
adding support for the "NEW" printers coming out.
Bob T.
Well, there are a lot of requests for a Stylus driver. So far, Studio
includes the best you can currently get for the Stylus on the Amiga. I had
several talks with Epson. So far, they have been very unpleasant and are
not even willing to lend me a testing device/manuals for a period of 4-5
weeks. The same thing is with Epson GQ language used by their laser
printers.
If a printer companies support is that worse, all I can say is: others do
a better job and my time/money won't be wasted nor should users consider
buying that printer (I'm still surprised how many people are considering
buying that Stylus printer… I personaly found the Canon BJ200/230 much
better in many ways or did I miss something?????).
Well, last time I spoke to Epson was on CeBit last month… this time they
are "thinking" about lending a printer to me. Let's hope they wake up…
hopefully soon…
— Wolf Faust, Am Dorfgarten 10, 6000 Frankfurt 50, Germany —
Very interesting Richard. Over here in the UK if a store advertises in
a paper or puts a price in a window it is regarded as an invitation
to 'treat', some weird legalism. It is extremely unlikely that a
british store would honour that advert.
Holy Cow…Micro Center is like a SAM'S CLUB after pay day. I just
picked up one of the 550C's for the advertised price (sorry Denny,
one per customer) and there was a note at all registers that it was
definitely a price error. In fact, there was a stack of 500C's right
beside them selling for the same price. There normal sale price was
$639.00. Geez, I didn't even need a printer, but I couldn't resist
this one. I don't think this was a marketing trick, with all the
volume that was going through that place.
Yeah, I went up there too! I have wanted one of the 550C HP printers
but couldn't justify the cost. Now today, I couldn't pass it up. So
I'm the proud owner of a 550C. Gonna try some color postscript
tonight!
Chris,.
Now I'm jealous, ;^0. I'd love PS 300 dpi color. My poor canon 1080 74 dpi
will just have to keep chugging along.
Gracia
Let's see, you have a 24 bit Epson color scanner, a 600 dpi LJ4m
laser printer, a CDROM drive, an A4000/040 computer, and a Sony 1302
monitor and your jealous of Me! Have I left anything out? <g>
Oh yeah, you can go down to the Greasy Corner at the intesection of
Highways 801 & 601 in Cooleemee and get some good eats at the F&F Bar
B Que too! Now that in itself is enough to make me jealous of you!
<heheheehe!>
Can't blame a girl for wanting everything ;^0!! Remember the CD-ROM
drive doesn't work …yet…waiting for SCSI card. If you every ate
at the F&F you'd know why we eat home cooked French & Chinese food
made with fresh ingredients, some from the garden.
I'm really getting into graphics & would love to have a 300 dpi color
printer. Service bureaus do not abound in NC and for simple things
that printer would be a gas. Actually I'd love the 300 dpi PaintJet.
Before you consider spending loads dosh on a PaintJet have alook at
the IBM Color Jetprinter PS4079. Over it's marketted by Lexmark.
Some of the features include up to A3 paper, 360 X 360 dpi, Pantone
colors, 4 cartridges for cmyk, std 4mb ram but can have up to 16mb,
Postscript installed pluse the usual 35 Type 1 faces, HP-GL 7475A
emulation (whatever that is) speed of about 70 secs for an A4 page
and 140secs for A3.
Over here the street price is #2300/2500.
I've seen the printouts and they are so much better than the paintjet
you have to see to beleive. I suppose the output is the nearest thing
an inkjet will get to a dye sublimation printer. Cetainly when my
existing printer goes bang I shall be seriously counting pennies.
Pete,
How could you do this to me ;^)! I want, I want. Seriously I'll try to
find a place that has one and take a look, though the prices seem the
same. The PaintJet 300XL is about $2300 street price, BUT I don't know if
that includes PS (which I think is $500 more). Maybe when I get enough
nerve to buy, the prices will be lower…that is the way color printing is
going ever since IBM "invented" color <G>.
Gracia
In the U.S., at commonlaw, an advertisement is not considered an
offer to sell by the merchant, which can be accepted or rejected by a
purchaser. Instead, an ad is considered an invitation for offers to
purchase by a prospective buyer, which may be accepted or rejected by
the seller (merchant).
However, there are various statutes that now regulate advertising,
so the commonlaw is not always applied.