Peter Fox makes some magical things to make me read } Having both a HP1150 and an HP PSC750 both attached to QPC2 and working } with Text87 and Prowess, what is all the fuss about?
The fuss is about 'modern-printer', the ones in which the printing engine (smart part, including Fonts) is in the computer, and not in the printer anymore. Modern-printer are more dumb than good old printer. The reason: cost reduction of the printer, price increase (and margin) on paper and ink.(once you bought the cheap printer, you HAVE to buy many expensive refill: but consumer rebels, they buy a new cheap printer instead and trashbin the empty one [but that's not ecological...]). } Admittedly, my } printers use PCL3 and PCL6 respectively and not PJL but the process is } very easy and no problem at all. That's still part of 'old' printers. Modern-ones are merely reduced to two motors: one for moving the print-head/paper, and another to deposit a little drop of ink... and the control is nearly done in realtime via the port. (call them winprinter, and you need a quick CPU). In old printer, you also had a CPU , RAM and ROM. Not anymore with some modern printer: at best you have a slow/cheap CPU and a little ram. If you want to enhance it, the computer must download the code to the printer beforehand. And usually, the enhancer is not as complete as the old ROM code (lack most complex operations: the computer is expected to break them in the reduced dialect first.) Some people would call that progress, I don't!
