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

[Theodore (Alex) Evans]

On 01/10/2014 09:51 PM, Aaron Wolfe wrote:
> I totally agree that it can't be sending that much data.  I suspect they
> use compression or some scheme that doesn't need all the bits all the time.
>
> Google turns up mountains of discussion on 16 bit per channel printers and
> the trouble they caused when they came out some years back because windows
> only supported 8 bit drivers (I'm assuming this = the 24 or 48 bit depth).
> While the general consensus seems to be that it doesn't make a whole lot of
> difference in the final output, I still am not finding anyone saying ink
> jets are 3 or 4 bpp mechanisms.  I know manufacturers like to push the
> truth, but marketing 16 bits and implementing one seems beyond what they
> could get away with.

I think that those 16 bits are for the printer driver capability 
considering that manufacturers usually don't give any kind of bits per 
dot for printer specs most of the time (the 3-4 figure was based on a 
cheap printer that used 3 or 4 colors of ink).  I know that early ink 
jets only supported on size dot and the Epson you indicated is probably 
significantly more flexible in this regard than most.  I dare say that 
the 16 bit figure you are looking at is for the color information that 
the driver can handle for input rather than the printer's output 
capability.  BTW, why were both of the examples you showed multifunction 
units rather than printers?  Yes, I did notice that target had a grand 
total of one printer on their site.

I know that PCL3GUI supports compression, but that is a real printer 
language rather than just raster imaging.