Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Software Issues and Discussion => Topic started by: Hyperspeed on June 23, 2004, 01:30:50 AM
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I recently bought TurboPrint 7.50 after reading news that it would
"Fully support 24-bit and 1440dpi printing with NEW routines"...
However, since my old TurboPrint 7 and even 5 couldn't actually print
at 1440dpi (no difference between 720dpi and 1440dpi) I decided to pay
an extra £50!
TurboPrint 7.50 merely offers drivers for more printers - what's the
point of supporting more printers if the existing support is so
rubbish?
TurboPrint is an excellent package don't get me wrong (I shudder to
think of the dark old days of Workbench drivers) and the Graphics
Publisher is sublime (even though the font support is useless).
I have talked with other people about this though and they say that
the PPC support is meaningless and non-functional and when I compare
print quality to the PC it is horrendous.
The PC (using the same Epson 740) prints in glorious, band-free,
grainy-free Microweave® whereas TurboPrint looks like it's printing in
Ham8 and with horrible dithering.
Go look at an Epson printout from a PC and one done on TurboPrint and
you'll be very dissapointed.
I paid £50 to have this sorted and nothing changed! Any other users
feel dissapointed by 7.50?
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@Hyperspeed
Thanks for confirming my suspicions...other Amigans swear by TurboPrint.....I dont! although i have never tried it.............I have never seen an Amiga have the Output quality of a PC and with such ease. I have never ever successfully printed anything on the Amiga ever! except on the A1000 using a Hewlett Packard LazerJet III.
Anyway according to you TurboPrint is an excellent package.....so is it worthy of me purchasing it if I want to print using an Amiga without a GFX card?
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Usually I find that it's the other way around - Windows makes a total mess of the print, Turboprint quality is 400% better.
Maybe you don't have something set up properly? It may have been worth contacting Irseesoft first before airing greavances publicly...
Turboprint is thought of very highly in the Amiga world, so you can bet it's not as poor as you've found it to be.
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I think it may be that turbo print is setup wrong. I have had it print where it looks like HAM mode on amigas all grain like that... But then there is an option to make it print even more impressive. Its been awhile now, and I know for sure I had an EPSON printer when I printed.........Come to think about it, i think the normal WB drivers printed more quickly and faster??? :-?
Meh, but either way. As long as it prints... :-D
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Thanks for confirming my suspicions...other Amigans swear by TurboPrint....
I used to swear *AT* TurboPrint... Does this count?
Anyhow, it worked fairly well with my old Canon BJC. That is, when I could get it to work. I bought the original, yet had to deal with all sorts of wacky registration issues. :-(
I always liked Canon Studio better. And I haven't used any of it in a couple years. It would be kind of helpful if Amiga could print to network printers, as that's how I've got everything hooked up, now... The parallel port is really pretty obsolete...
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I get really good colour results from TurboPrint 7 with my HP692C printer, aside from the printer being an unreliable pile of ****.
I use STfax Pro as well, and when I want to "print to" a fax to send from Final Writer or whatever, I need to run the TurboPrint-remove program. That works OK, but when I re-run TurboPrint afterwards, it usually freezes or creates some problem.
Anyone else get this, or know of a better way to do the fax thing??
Unfortunately there is no support for multiple printers, so it's not a case of printing to STfax instead of TurboPrint.
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I didn't mean to sound scathing of TurboPrint 7.50, it is a fantastic
package that has helped me a lot.
It's just I paid £50 to upgrade only a little bit and I have had
nothign extra. The sales-pitch for 7.50 was that the printing on
Epsons had now been fixed, but it hasn't.
New drivers are there for the newer Epsons but the old drivers for
older Stylus machine do NOT support 1440dpi mode. On a PC there is a
tremendous difference between 720dpi and 720x1440dpi. The TP7 manual
claims there is very little difference.
Incidentally PowerComputing sold me a Scanquix5.4 CD that had been
printed cheaply on TurboPrint 7 and an Epson - I could tell by the
noticeable black dots in the dithering pattern.
The official Epson® driver is far more subtle and on the Stylus 740
produces a beautiful marble dithering when in Microweave® mode. It's
wonderful for subtle skintones and perfect gradients.
Apart from the non-functioning PowerPC option I have also heard the
Hypercom fast parallel port users do not get any faster speeds and
ink-level monitoring doesn't seem to be implemented.
I notice too that 7.x is a lot more unstable in the GFX Publisher than
5.x
Irseesoft never replied to me regarding my settings, but I think after
tonnes of cartridges and paper I have tried all combinations.
Please keep your comments coming, hopefully the author will pick up
some constructive criticism for the good of us all!
:-)
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Usually I find that it's the other way around - Windows makes a total mess of the print, Turboprint quality is 400% better.
Same here.. TP made far better prints then my Win2K.. It does require some fine tuning but once setup, worked great..
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Hello Castellen!
Well I bought STFax a few years ago and never used it, then I
downloaded the latest STFax4 for free! The author gave it away
FREEWARE last year!
DOH!
I think STFax has it's own printer driver in DEVS:Printers/ called
STFaxPRT.
I've never used it but I think you select this as your driver from
within the program. And ofcourse remove TurboPrint.
STFax obviously prints to the serial port but when you receive I'm not
sure what happens. If it printed to the Workbench drivers you wouldn't
get very nice results.
Although having said that a fax is not photographic quality so maybe
Workbench driver settings are fine.
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I've been using TurboPrint for ages and got the 7.50 update after switching from an Epson Stylus Colour 850 (couldn't clean the head any further and still got stripes) to an Canon i950. I've been printing A4 borderless photos at 4800x1200 dpi and the quality is impressive. You need to have the right settings (and paper) though. Also, I found some bugs (concerning TrueMatch and high resolutions), but Florian Zeiler immediately fixed them and sent me a new version.
TurboPrint supports a lot of different dithering patterns -- I've always been using the Super-Error-Diffusion with excellent results. No black dots whatsoever. The only way I think you could be getting these black dots would probably be a "wrong" value in the Truematch UCR settings.
AFAIK the PPC dithering routines only work under PowerUP. Anyway, the TP7.50 binaries seem to work nicely under MorphOS aswell -- and then it's really fast enough :)
Also, the Epson ESCTool coming with TurboPrint is a third party contribution and if you have read the docs, the ink level display has never been implemented. Nothing to blame IrseeSoft for.
I never found GraphicsPublisher unstable except for the ASL Font Requester, which seems to be unstable on my machine per se.
In general, I am very satisfied with TP and I am happy that the Amiga is still supported by IrseeSoft, despite the poor revenues.
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I am getting ready to buy TurboPrint 7.50 and a new printer. Does TP work better with Epson or HP printers? I am thinking about getting this printer.
Hewlett Packard OJ7140xi All-in-One
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF25a/18972-238444-410635-12019-f51-91462.html
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Turboprint is a good piece of software but 50 quid for a few printer drivers is just to expensive, especially if the printer that the user has bought is cheap (ie TP costs more than the printer).
Irseesoft and Hyperion should make some sort of deal out for OS4 as they should be standard in a OS.
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Pyromania wrote:
I am getting ready to buy TurboPrint 7.50 and a new printer. Does TP work better with Epson or HP printers? I am thinking about getting this printer.
Hewlett Packard OJ7140xi All-in-One
One thing to consider when thinking about buying an HP printer is the cost of ink. Generally, HP ink is a lot more expensive than Epson and Canon ink. In the long run an HP printer will have cost you more than the other printers.
I haven't used an Amiga to print in a long while so I don't know about compatibility issues, but I would recommend the Canon i865 (I have one for my PC). It produces excellent prints, indistinguishable from real photos, can print on 10x15cm (4"x6") photo-sized paper and can print on CD-Rs and DVD-Rs. The ink is also very resonably priced and lasts long.
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Ilwrath wrote:
It would be kind of helpful if Amiga could print to network printers, as that's how I've got everything hooked up, now... The parallel port is really pretty obsolete...
Perhaps this could be helpful to you (I have not looked into it myself though):
http://www.pegasos.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=119&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0 (http://www.pegasos.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=119&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0)
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Thanx for the quick reply Casper, the Canon i865 looks ok but I need a Multi-Function printer Fax/Copy/Scan/Print.
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i totally agree, KennyR.
Obviously not all the latest printers are fully supported but with the right TP setup, the quality is higher than with win.
IMHO and from my direct experience, i think that Epson printers (consumer models lines) are the best companion of TP.
Ciao
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Paul_Gadd wrote:
Irseesoft and Hyperion should make some sort of deal out for OS4 as they should be standard in a OS.
Maybe too late. TurboPrint is now an integral part of MorphOS.
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@Hyperspeed
Yeah, I too bought STfax back when it wasn't free, but it's been good value for money. I run it 24/7 and use it's voicemail and fax features a lot.
It has it's own print driver, which programs "print" to in order to generate a fax. From within programs like Final Writer, you can't select a printer. Normally Turboprint 7.2 is running, so captures all prints. You have to disable (remove) TurboPrint in order for STfax to capture the print.
TurboPrint remove works fine, but it's when I re-run it after I'm finished spooling to STfax, the TurboPrint prefs box comes up, and clicking save or use usually makes it freeze.
I'm wondering if it's just my setup, or if this is a common problem? Or is there another way to get around this?
Perhaps an upgrade to TP 7.5 might fix it, but if the only difference is additional printer drivers, then maybe not?
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I've used TurboPrint for several years with few complaints.
However, plug and go highest possible quality with a new printer would be pure luck. A bit of experimenting can work wonders.
I've used non-supported HP printers for color printing with a good deal of success. The DJ 1200 is supported, but the paper handling did not last. I've been using a couple of unsupported DJ 1600's with that driver. TP does great 300dpi color on them, but don't try to use the 600dpi B&W.
I asked my employer to get me a Photosmart printer that TP supported. Our IT department bought an unsupported PS 6122. With no hope of an exchange, I went to the HP sponsored DeskJet project at SourceForge. I noted what printers were grouped with the PS 6122 that TurboPrint supported. The DJ 96Xc, DJ 98Xc, & DJ 99Xc drivers all work with the PS 6122. I've chosen the 98Xc as best for my purposes. I get excellent 300dpi & 600dpi printouts, and very fine photo printing even without a huge amount of resolution in the file.
For many years I've printed banners on the old PaintJet printer. First I used Posters from Deluxe Photolab, then with a custom page size using TurboPrint. One of the drivers I use with the PS 6122 allows me to specify custom page sizes with no apparent limits. When this would not allow me to print pages over 22 inches long I emailed TP support. To my surprise, I was told they had never supported banner paper printing.
Based on my research I believe there is a way around this. Documentation for the PC says that if your software does not properly support fanfold/banner printing to use a script to send the fanfold escape code to the printer before printing from your application. Can anybody tell me how to do this on an Amiga?
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Generally, HP ink is a lot more expensive than Epson and Canon ink.
I don't know about that. I just paid about $160 for an Epson R300. Then I went out and bought a full set of ink cartridges for it for $80. That's half the price of the printer. Obviously, these companies are giving the printers away in order to sell ink.
Now I haven't used the Epson much except to print on CDs, but according to the ink gauges that appear on your screen as you print from it, it's going through ink pretty fast on all six cartridges. So, even using it just for CDs and the occasional photo, this is going to be one costly printer.
My HP 1220 Deskjet uses a high-capacity black cartridge and a combo cartridge for color. The colors usually run out pretty much simultaneously, although there are exceptions as when you design a piece with lots and lots of one color in it and print many copies of it. A full set of two cartridges goes for $60-$70 and satisfactory off-brands are available. In my experience the B&W ones work fine. But all these companies play the same game in order to sell more ink: They keep coming up with new models that use redesigned ink cartridges in order to make it costly for third parties to horn in on the ink business.
For all those reasons, printing by inkjet is an expensive proposition and the printers themselves are such a small part of the cost of owning one that it rarely makes sense to price shop among the different brands. In the long run, you end up paying about the same from one brand to another and even from one model to another within the same brand.
HB
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I upgraded to TP7.60 to run my new Epson C84, which it does superbly. 24-bit prints are as good as I get from a pc.
Cheers,
JaX
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My A4000T with TurboPrint 7.3x for my Epson Stylus Color 660 prints better than my Win-DOHS PC could ever hope to, even when using the same printer.
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My A4000 with Hypercom and TP7 prints very quickly with Epson Stylus 600. I have used photoglossy paper with 720x720 and this was as good as PC. 720x1440 made printout darker and slower not better. But i now think printing with inkjet is too expensive in color or in black and white. i think its cheaper to take photos/digital images to photolab and quality is better. as for text, laser is cheaper and faster, so i think inkjets are not a good printing option. btw tP7 is supposed to offer postscript printing on non post script printers. anyone know how to achieve this?
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@takemehomegrandma-
Hey, thanks for that link!
I had messed with NetParLpr before, but couldn't seem to get it to print properly. The printer would respond, and would print ASCII text... But would ONLY print ASCII text. If I sent an HPGL file (it's an HP printer), it would print it as ASCII text.... :-P
That was a year or two ago, though. Who knows how many newer versions of things have come out since then. (Or maybe the original fault was user error....) I'll give it another go by those instructions, and see what happens.
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Ilwrath wrote:
It would be kind of helpful if Amiga could print to network printers, as that's how I've got everything hooked up, now... The parallel port is really pretty obsolete...
You mean print to a printer on the network? The amiga can do that... I had a setup where my wife's printer was on her PC upstairs and I could print to it from the amiga in the basement over a wireless ethernet connection. You have to get involved with printer servers and all that good stuff, but it is possible. There was a script called printspool or something that would wake up every 30 seconds or so and check to see if there were any amiga print requests. If so, it would automatically copy it to a spool directory on the PC and print it.
Downside is that I would have to run up 2 flights of stairs to get the printout. :lol:
-Thorrin
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@JaXanim
JaXanim wrote:
I upgraded to TP7.60 to run my new Epson C84, which it does superbly. 24-bit prints are as good as I get from a pc
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Hmmm, I have an Epson C84..........now you and some people have inspired me to take TP into consideration.................I will be happy with just regualr printouts that are printed quick and nice.
@thorrin
Thorrin wrote:
You mean print to a printer on the network? The amiga can do that... I had a setup where my wife's printer was on her PC upstairs and I could print to it from the amiga in the basement over a wireless ethernet connection. You have to get involved with printer servers and all that good stuff, but it is possible. There was a script called printspool or something that would wake up every 30 seconds or so and check to see if there were any amiga print requests. If so, it would automatically copy it to a spool directory on the PC and print it.
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How on earth did you connect your Amiga wirelessly? pleasse explain as i am dying to do this!
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How on earth did you connect your Amiga wirelessly? pleasse explain as i am dying to do this!
OK, sorry... bit of a misunderstanding... The amiga (and dreamcast) was wired to the hub, but HER computer / printer was on a wireless connection along with our laptop.
It still may be possible to do wireless with the amiga though, but the amiga may have to be 'tethered' to a PC.
-Thorrin
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BTW a couple of people on the Pagestream mailing list mentioned that printing to Xerox colour lasers using TP to make the PostScript gave the same results as on PC. We're talking 2400 dpi though ;-)
Personally I'm going to be looking for a good solid 1200 dpi laser with 32+ Mb, I use a HP4000 at work and my publisher can equal it's B&W photo reproduction.
With HP all-in-one printers I've seen 4 at work, out of which 2 had a broken scanner after 2 years of light work - if you're getting one be sure to buy a 3 year support pack!
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Darn I just wrote a good response and Voyager 2.95.7 crashed.
:-)
Never mind here goes again:
With regards to using STFax4.x and TurboPrint - I'm not really sure as
I haven't used STFax at all in practise. I heard the Pace Solo 56k was
the best modem for it because of the caller ID and answerphone
features etc.
The last menu-tab on TurboPrint offers the option to "Ignore WB Prefs"
so maybe playing with this would allow for STFax's own way of doing
things, and also there is "Menu Resident" and "Turboprint Resident"
next to this - try experimenting with the last tab of TurboPrefs to
see.
In response to people saying their Amiga/TurboPrint combos are getting
better results than a PC/Epson drivers... I think that's highly
unlikely unless your PC settings are horribly wrong. Think about it -
Epson wrote the drivers, Microsoft wrote tonnes of colour-matching
routines.
I used an old P1 166MMX and Amiga '060 and I have to say the PC
thrashed TurboPrint 7.50 in terms of quality. I used Super-Diffusion,
1440dpi, Turbo-Quality and it couldn't compete with Microweave® on the
Epson printer CD.
In response to the comments about banner printing, I know both
TurboPrefs AND GraphicsPublisher allow you to use Poster Print where
your picture can be stretched over a grid representing like an A0
poster comprised of little A4 sub-sections. It's marvellous.
My hat off to the TurboPrint author(/s) it's a good program. If only
it tickled my Stylus 740 into true Microweave mode!
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Oh great, now I'm noticing on the Irseesoft website.
It did go to version 7.60 within a month of me buying 7.50 and now
they want 45 euros to upgrade!
Grrr!
I'm angry that what they promised in the adverts wasn't delivered, in
fact I think I read about it from the news section on Amiga.org!
The amount of printers they are supporting is ridiculous. You can't
dedicate your effort to get the most out of one printer when there is
about 50x on that list.
Better if they worked on 1x HP, 1x Epson and 1x Canon and said "Look:
buy this printer and we'll do you a really good driver". Better than
make crap for ALL the printers.
:-/
Anyway, I've written to them to ask them what's going on and why
TP7.50 doesn't activate microweave and stuff. Hopefully I'm just
ranting over nothing.
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I found out for many years TP printed faster and better than my windows machines becuase windows up to XP had 12 bit printer drivers not 24 bit.
Also I use the PS printing feature alot and it works great install Ghostscript and now all you do is copy a PS file to PS: device and bingo Postscript printing on your non postscript printer.
I use a small script with final writer becuase I can create a postscripte file and print it several times faster than printing with final writer straight.
heck tp still prints better than XP to my HP Laser printers
windows tends to spool data too fast and overflows the buffer resulting in me getting partial prints.
you problem is more than likely a bug in the driver for your printer type or User error.
RTFM
I am thinkinfg user error especially since you have yet to mention what setttings you are using.
kgrach
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I've not fully gotten to grips with TP7.60's PostScript/GhostScript printing, but what I have managed so far is very impressive.
I think it's only fair to note that no classic Amiga is gonna turn out a 24-bit colour prints as fast as a Pentium based machine. Even an 060/66 Amiga is slow. What is clear, the image quality produced by the Graphics Publisher is unlikely to be bettered by a typical PeeCee setup. That's my opinion anyway.
Cheers,
JaX
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I bought a Pentium¹ 166Mhz MMX last year and decided to do a fair experiment.
I printed the same picture out, with the same printer and same paper etc with both an Amiga '060 and the Win '98 166Mhz.
The 166Mhz PC was 2x as fast and at double the resolution to the '060 Amiga. Quality was also double that of Turboprint using the official Epson driver.
If you wish to read what settings I was using refer to the start of my thread, believe me I have "RTFM".
;-)
I've been printing photos on TurboPrint since version 5 back in 1997 I think it was.
What I have yet to understand is the Postscript feature, it is possible that by spooling a printout I might not get the banding I get with my 740... but that never happened on the Stylus 600 so it wouldn't matter.
Anyone reading this, how do you use Postscript and what's it for? I thought it was for lasers? I think 1440dpi should work without Postscript though; maybe I'm being too picky with my magnifying glass.
:-D
One gets to see the difference mostly on large areas of subtle colours such as pastels. The PC was eventually sold to pay for loads of ink carts and paper, it was pretty old and big but it was nice to see how the other side live.
:-D :-D :-D