[SunHELP] printer suggestions?

[Frank-Christian Kruegel]

On Sun, 14 Apr 2002 12:05:31 -0600 (MDT), you wrote:

>my trusty old epson lq870 died yesterday - sumptomps: power led goes
>on, but nothing else. anyone know if there is a fuse somewhere that i
>need to change?
>
>i checked ebay, and used replacements, including shipping, come to
>$40-50.  i guess i am really in an obsolete technology.
>
>now i am thinking of moving into the modern era. i have
>parallel ports on all my machines (ss2, ss10), and have ghostscript
>running on the ss10. currently i need only text printing, but i plan
>to put gimp on the ss10 and color printing would be nice then.
>
>so what is a suggested good printer for light text use plus some
>reasonable quality color printing which is supported by ghostscript
>and gimp, and cn be driven from a parallel port?

I just started tests with Ghostscript 6.53+GimpPrint 4.20 using the
stp driver on my Epson Stylus Photo 1200, and it looks very promising.
However, the SS10 (2*90 MHz Hypersparc) is a bit too slow. It took
nearly 20 minutes to render a 2048*1536 JPEG from a Olympus Digicam.
It's ok if you understand the huge amount of data (1440 dpi, 6 inks,
variable drop size, this yields easiliy _many_ megabytes of printer
data).

The Epson ink jet printers are very good at photo printing -
especially the 6-ink models ("Photo"). HP printers are better for text
printing, but I doesn't care since I have a HP 6MP Postscript Laser
for that. And with Gimp-Print the printer support seems to be adequate
- even with 6-ink usage.


Mit freundlichen Gren

Dipl.-Ing. Frank-Christian Krgel
IstDa Kommunikationssysteme