Re: Best Parallel Card suited for use with Bubble, Ink, DeskJet or Laser Printers?

[CUTjefbla@bconnex.net (Jeff Blakeney)]

On 29 Sep 1998 09:30:26 GMT, supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer) wrote:

>You don't really need an accelerator.  The accelerator helps
>with RENDERING, not the actual transfer of data.  It will
>speed up the overall print job, but that's true of both serial
>and parallel connections.
>
>Will it print just as fast?  Yes.  57600 is plenty fast for the
>speed a BubbleJet, Epson InkJet, or DeskJet prints.  For
>a Laser printer of the Postscript variety, the parallel card
>might be faster.  For PCL Laser printers, there probably
>will not be much of a difference because at these speeds,
>the actual rendering will be the limiting factor.

Yes, the rendering speed can limit the printing speed but I'm pretty
sure that the transmission speed from the computer to the printer is
also a factor so I'll play devil's advocate for a second and post a
few things to think about.

A printer capable of printing 300x300 dpi on a 8.5"x11" sheet allowing
for .25" border around edge of sheet that can't be printed on leaves
8"x10.5" or 2400x3150 pixels.  If each pixel is represented by one
bit, that makes 945,000 bytes for the entire page as a rendered bit
map.

At 57,600 bps this would take approximately 2.74 minutes to send to
the printer at optimal performance.  That would be just over a third
of a page per minute.  I haven't actually tried it myself but I'm
pretty sure an accelerated IIgs won't take almost 3 minutes to render
a single page at 300 dpi so in this case, using a serial connection to
the printer would slow down the printing speed.

Most of the printers out there are capable or printing more than one
page per minute which means using a 57,600 bps serial connection would
slow the printer down if you could generate and send the page
information to the printer quickly enough.

A parallel connection sending the same data at 56,700 bytes per second
would take 16.4 seconds at optimal performance.  That would be about
3.5 pages per minute.  This is because parallel transmissions happen
at 8 to 10 times faster than serial.

So, in my mind, both the rendering speed and transmission speed are
extremely important to getting fast print jobs.

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    Jeff Blakeney - Dean of the Apple II University on Delphi