On Sun, 12 Oct 2003 10:38:12 +0100, Roy wood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
All this talk of printers for the QL has been quite interesting and I would have joined in earlier except that Demon's mail server has been playing up and some of the messages have been severely delayed.
If anyone wants a laser printer that will work with most QL programs they should look into the EPSON EPL 6100. This has the ESC/P2 driver built in which will work with ProWesS and is backwardly compatible with other EPSON drivers. It is of course only B&W but it should sell at around 200 pounds. Beware of the EPL 6100L which is a cheaper version with no ESC/P2 driver.
You could also try the Kyocera FS1010 which has an EPSON emulation built in but some of the characters are a bit odd. I am sure that a suitable translation could be done if some one wanted to do it. (One example is the pound sign comes out as two hearts and a hash symbol from quill. Quite how one symbol turns into three I have no idea.)
This problem with printing will only get worse because, as mainstream computers become more and more powerful and sophisticated the need to build drivers and emulations into printers will decrease and the manufacturers will save a few pennies by not bothering to put them in. At the moment there are still some printers available with them in because some businesses still use DOS based programs but their use is decreasing rapidly.
Our problem is not one of connection but of sheer programming because all of our programs are designed to print directly with their own drivers and that is not how modern printers have developed. Just making a connection will not solve much. Marcel, Jochen and I discussed this QPC2 Printer programme at length while we were together in the US but this will be of no use to anyone not using QPC2. A similar solution has to be worked out for other hardware platforms and that will not be an easy task.
By the way Tony - of course a dot matrix is more reliable than an inkjet or laser printer. This is the same reason that a bicycle does not suffer from a cracked cylinder head or some such thing. It is just not as sophisticated and does not have so many moving parts. On the whole, though, the output is pretty bad in comparison to even the cheapest inkjet. You can still by new dot matrix EPSON printers with the emulations intact but they are often more expensive than laser printers because the manufactures can only sell you a ribbon as a consumable and there is not a great need for these because they last so long. On a laser they can sell you drums, fusers, toners and, in HPs case even the tractor pads wear out and need replacing! Masses more profit there! Cynical, me?
Hi Roy and Tony (and all of course)
One quick note regarding reliability. Unless it is an EXPENSIVE, PRODUCTION (ie Business grade) impact printer,
it is not as reliable as a decent laser printer. Please note that in today's market a laser printer (decent one) is usually cheaper than an impact printer (This trend is not new as apart from low end dot matrix printers, Line printers and Daisy Wheel printers were generally more expensive even before the proliferation of Laser printers).
One thing that may cloud this is that in the UK dot matrix printers were extremely expensive at times that they shouldn't have. Ie looking at SQLW (that Roy had sent me a while ago if you remember Roy) ads for STAR LC-10 and LC24-10 I see that these were selling at absurd prices even on their height of popularity. (Compare £100+ prices with the equivalent of Greek prices of around £30 brand new at the time).
In actuality therefore the initial price is a not a real measurement of cost as any decent laser printer will give you thousands of pages that are always perfect without jams. A reinked ribbon on the otherhand can destroy the print head on a impact printer or a paper jam on a botched perforation point can wreak havoc with the head transport.
Roy you are not exactly right when you argue that laser printers need repairs very often. You tend to forget that most people take a laser printer for granted. In the amount of time a laser printer will need repairs it has probably already printed 10 times as much as an impact printer and at the cost of consumables it's already paid off its price. In order to compare we should use like items (ie laser printers vs line printers that print just as fast as lasers). There yes, line printers are far better than lasers -see my previous email- but at what cost? A quasi-decent line printer will set you back more than 10,000 pounds!!! Does that compare with a good laser printer's average cost of £399????
Regarding the "Modern" printers argument, I think that it is faulty. What you call modern printers are in reality windows-consumer oriented printers. For business use there are still (and will be for a long time) stand-alone printers that do not require a host's processing power. Otherwise mixed environment networks with dedicated printer servers would be impractical. (ie you get a printer server and a printer to avoid local printing and to process the output as fast as possible, A processing power premium -driver overhead- does not make much sense).
One thing that will be phased out eventually however is the parallel port as new asynchronous serial ports offer faster speeds without the cabling and distance prohibitions. That's where we should be concentrating and not drivers that can or could develop as turnover for printers in the low end category is months not years nowadays.
Phoebus
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