davids@cup.portal.com (David Kenneth Schreiber) (07/14/90)
[I'm too tired to think of a line-eater joke]
Can anyone tell me at what speed the Amiga's parallel port transfers
data (in particular, to a DeskJet+ printer)? I'm thinking about getting
a multi-port serial board to which I would attach my printer to so as to
free up my parallel port (for my audio digitizer) and am concerned about
a performance decrease when printing at 300dpi (the max baud rate of the
printer is 19.2 kbps). Printing a 300dpi page out of Pagestream now takes
a little more than 4.5 minutes. Printing at 300dpi, I calculate, would
take 80 (square inches in a DJ page) times 300^2 (dots in a square inch
at 300dpi) divided by 8 (bits in a byte) times 10 (bits in a byte +
start & stop bits) divided by 19200 (bits per second) divided by 60 (seconds
in a minute) minutes to send all the dots in the image using the serial
port at 19200 baud. This gives:
((( 80 * 300 * 300 * 10) / 8) / 19200) / 60 = 7.8125 minutes
which is a quite a bit slower than using the parallel port, if my
calculations are correct. So I ask, are they correct, or will I have
to wait longer for my printouts if I use a serial connection?
On a related note, does the Amiga parallel port have a fixed speed, or
will data be transmitted to the printer faster if a faster machine is
used (or does it depend on the printer)? On another related note,
will the release version of 2.0 have support for printers connected
to a multiport serial board? Thanks.
-Dave Schreiber at davids@cup.portal.com "Coffee, Darling?"
P.S. The Pagestream benchmark was performed as a quick test using
a page than took very little time for the program to compute when
generating the 300dpi image for the printer; computation time was
not very signifigant compared to print time (and even if it was,
it wouldn't change my concern).