[Coco] Printing on cheap crappy printers with a CoCo was Re: Printing on a Coco with modern printers.

[Aaron Wolfe]

On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 10:04 PM, Theodore (Alex) Evans
<alxevans at concentric.net> wrote:
> I would like to point out that as a dot on an ink jet printer is either on
> or off for each ink color.  A dumb printer is more likely to only use 3 or 4
> bits per dot rather than 24 or 32.  Still at 600 dpi, this would be 10-12 MB
> per page but that is a whole lot less than 75-100 MB per page.
>

I actually spent a little time on Google prior to posting the 90MB
estimate.  I didn't find any printers claiming less than 24 bits per
pixel.  I did find some like this one:

http://www.target.com/p/hp-deskjet-1055-inkjet-all-in-one-multifunction-printer-copier-scanner-j410e/-/A-12763402

which claims 48bit depth and "up to" 4800x1200 dpi, for $50.   that's
a whopping 3 gigabytes per page!  They must be compressing data sent
over the wire quite a bit. I can't imagine even a modern PC printing
3GB pages in an acceptable timeframe.  Anyway, 600dpi/24bit color was
quite a conservative estimate for a modern printer.