TurboPrint 7.50 - Ripoff

[Hyperspeed]

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?

[Hyperspeed]

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!

:-)

[Hyperspeed]

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.

[Hyperspeed]

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!

[Hyperspeed]

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.

[Hyperspeed]

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