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! UUCP: {harvard|rutgers|ucbvax}!uwvax!astroatc!nicmad!madnix!perry CIS: 76004,1765 (what was that about ``giggling teenagers''?)