[comp.sys.amiga] HI Speed Access To HowTek PixelMaster

perry@madnix.UUCP (Perry Kivolowitz) (06/09/89)

The HowTek PixelMaster has been pushed reasonably well into the Amiga
market. It is a plain paper color printer  with a 240 DPI resolution.
Its primary  drawback  has  been its incredibly slow performance when
run over the Amiga's serial or parallel port. Image downloading times
of an hour or more are not uncommon.

One of the reasons that downloading image  data to the PixelMaster is 
so slow is that it actually take 24 bit color data as its source with
no compression modes available.

Fortunately, the PixelMaster comes with an IEEE-488  interface  which
can attain speeds much higher than the parallel  or  serial ports are
capable.

We've just gotten the IEEE-488  interface  of the PixelMaster working
over the same  cable  as  our Sharp color scanners (supported by Pro-
fessional ScanLab). The results are pretty nice. The PixelMaster will
absorb data at 30,000 bytes per  second  as compared to the less than
1,000 per second  over  serial or parallel lines. Additionally, while
achieving  a  30  times  performance   increase  the  amount of color
resolution is 32 times  higher  than HAM (262,000 colors) when driven
from Pro ScanLab.

What we'd like to know is: Is anyone interested in this capability?


-- 
                        Perry Kivolowitz, ASDG Inc.
ARPA: madnix!perry@cs.wisc.edu   {uunet|ncoast}!marque!
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CIS:  76004,1765 (what was that about ``giggling teenagers''?)