Re: OT : Anyone know much about HP Laserjet 5Si under Windows XP?

[Alan Shields <ha@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

<uninformed rambling>
It may be to do with the amount of memory or the processor speed in the
printer,

using HP/GL2 windows will send drawing primitives to the printer, so
the printer would need to build the image itself - if there was
insufficient memory for the whole page I suppose it would set a clip
for the first part, execute all the drawing commands (creating an
internal raster) and print, repeating this until the page is complete -
it may even be necessary for windows to resend the HP/GL2 commands as
each section is drawn.

Using raster mode windows would generate the page raster, (I would
imagine this to be better optimized as this is how most windows
printers work - also you have the superior processor performance of the
pc on your side) and in the case of low memory on the printer it could
just send the raster a small piece at a time.

Years ago when when we used to have printers hanging off of the end of
rs232 lines from terminal servers sending windows print jobs to raster
only printers would take forever, as it was sending the entire bitmap
over a slow serial line, whereas by comparison sending a mix of text &
hp/gl2 attributes was almost instantaneous due to the relatively small
amount of data involved, obviously these days the connection speed to
the printer is significantly higher.

As for advantages/disadvantages of the two I suspect it's going to be
down to the print quality, I suppose HL/GL2 could achieve higher
resolutions and better accuracy for cad style applications, but I would
expect raster to have an easier time of matching the windows wysiwyg
image.
</uninformed rambling>

Somebody please correct me if the above is complete twoddle.
Cheers

Alan Shields

On 23 Oct 2004, at 00:32, Phil Harris wrote:

>
>
> Just picked up an HP 5Si for use at home - it works fine but if I have
> the
> printer driver set to "Graphics Mode - HPGL/2" then it takes
bloody
> ages to
> print anything more than simple text ... Setting the printer driver to
> "Graphics Mode - Raster" speeds things up hugely - certainly
by a
> factor of
> 20 or so.
>
> Anyone know what the advantages / disadvantages of using the
"raster"
> option
> rather than "HPGL/2" are?
>
> Also - this 5Si *SHOULD* be a 5SiMx but it has had the postscript SIMM
> stripped out by some muppet who probably assumed it was printer RAM -
> anyone
> got any ideas where I may get a replacement PostScript SIMM from
> (preferably
> not at HP prices) - I checked up on ebay a couple of days ago and
there
> wasn't anything up there then.
>
> Cheers
>
> Phil
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
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>