Printers Still Improving


Color-capabilities Lacking

January 09, 1989|By PHILLIP ROBINSON Knight-Ridder Newspapers

Printers have improved greatly in the past 10 years, but one thing hasn't changed much: Most still print in one color, black.

Granted, some home computer printers have been able to print crude color. But business printers have been hard pressed even to reproduce the two colors, red and black, you can get out of the average typewriter.

That's changing.

The best color printers still aren't cheap enough for anyone but well-paid professionals in fields where color printing is a must. There are no color laser printers on the market yet, and color wax thermal printers that have some laser-printer characteristics cost $5,000 to $25,000.

For those on a more limited budget, however, manufacturers have begun to offer less costly alternatives that produce color printing suitable for some business use. The two basic printing techniques used are dot-matrix impact printing using color ribbons, and "ink-jet" printing that squirts tiny droplets of colored ink onto a page.

I recently got a chance to test the best-known color ink-jet printer and a new, big-name color dot-matrix printer. Here's a brief look.

The Toshiba P321SLC - call it the SLC for short - produces color the old-fashioned way: impact dot-matrix printing.

The SLC (which stands for slim line color) is a cousin of some other P321 models that can print only in black. It is one of the newer-design 24-pin printers, which can lay down smaller dots closer together, making smoother, more legible characters than older nine-pin models. The 24 pins produce graphics at up to 360 dots per inch.

The machine prints in color by using the pins to press ink from a special ribbon with four color stripes onto the page. The colored stripes alone or in combination let the machine print in seven colors (orange, green, purple, yellow, cyan, magenta, brown), plus black.

An outstanding feature of the SLC is its ability to switch from printing on standard fanfold, tractor-feed "computer" paper to printing on cut sheets without removing the fanfold paper.

There's quite a bit of intelligence built into the P321. It has a front-panel display and four buttons that let you set up the printer simply. You can use the buttons to move to the next or the previous configuration category and choose the next or the previous option in that category. You can dictate line spacing, font, emulation mode and so on.

Three fonts are standard: high-speed draft, courier and prestige elite. Toshiba offers other fonts on disk that you may transmit to the printer when needed.

Another way to beef up the fonts of the printer is to use special font cards. There are two slots on the front of the printer that act as docking ports for the special chip-carrying cards.

It isn't easy finding applications programs that can drive the P321SLC in color yet, al though many can drive the SLC using only the black stripe on the ribbon.

By contrast, the H-P PaintJet follows in the footsteps of H-P's popular ThinkJet black-and-white printer. It uses special paper that costs about three times as much as standard paper, but doesn't feel too slick or strange, and ink cartridges to shoot drops of ink at the page. Because there is no hammer or wire slamming into the page, these ink-jet printers are quiet.

I've always been a big fan of the ThinkJet because it is fast, quiet, and small. H-P's more recent DeskJet can print at 300 dots per inch, the same resolution you find on laser printers. The PaintJet doesn't go quite that far, reaching only 180 dots per inch resolution, but it does it in color.

The PaintJet also shows some real advances over the ThinkJet. This machine is about as easy to set up as any peripheral I've ever had, including built-in slots for priming and wiping the ink cartridges.

The control panel on the front of the PaintJet is very simple, with just on-off, top of form, form feed and line feed buttons. I found it tricky to feed paper into the ThinkJet because it didn't have a platen knob for advancing the paper; the PaintJet does.

Once you're set up mechanically, it's time to think about software. If you have a color graphics program, you'll probably find that it has a PaintJet driver.

There are three built-in fonts - courier and two pitches of letter Gothic - as well as foreign character sets, boldface, underlining, compressed and expanded styles. This isn't much font flexibility compared with the SLC or many other 24-pin dot-matrix printers.

The PaintJet produces text at from 167 characters per second for 10 pitch text and 300 characters for 18 pitch text. It can print text in seven colors. The 330 colors that the PaintJet can give graphics make this printer worthwhile.

I didn't like the color print quality from the SLC as much as I did from the PaintJet. Fills, or colored-in areas, on the SLC showed more apparent horizontal and vertical lines than the PaintJet, residue from the passes back and forth and the lines of pins in the print head.

At $949 for 24-pin quality, fanfold and cut-sheet handling, fancy cards for fonts and front-panel access to virtually every internal control, the SLC is a fine printer - but not for color printing.

If you want to print in color, especially graphics, go for the PaintJet. It is the least expensive color printer that can produce top-quality charts and pictures.

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