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?

[leirbag28]

@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?

[KennyR]

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.

[kd7ota]

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

[Ilwrath]

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...

[Castellen]

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.

[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!

:-)

[seer]

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..

[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.

[platon42]

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.

[Pyromania]

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

[Paul_Gadd]

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.

[Casper]

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.

[takemehomegrandma]

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

[Pyromania]

Thanx for the quick reply Casper, the Canon i865 looks ok but I need a Multi-Function printer Fax/Copy/Scan/Print.