Help needed with Techjet, Canon, HP, Heidi Wide-Format-Printer, Plotter

Please help me with the following problems. I recently received a
TechJet 5336 PS w/ postscript option. I am making the Techjet
available to our local Resident/Community Association to print posters
11x17 - 36x48 which are placed at various locations in the community,
in relation to various events.

I've been experimenting with various drivers and found that the Canon
W3050 - W9000, HP GL/2, HP 750C/PS all work with to some degree with
the Techjet 5336 under win2000 and/or Linux and/or OSX. However, I
noticed that it takes a very long time to print. This appears to be
related to the page-at-a-time mechanism used to print.

Does anyone know of other compatible
Postscript/CAD/Canon/Epson/Techjet/HP/Other drivers that work with the
Techjet 5336 PS that might work with the printer, under linux, win2k,
or winxp.

Does anyone know whether or not other manufacturers used a compatible
print-engine?

Can anyone tell me the difference between the Techjet 5336, 5436, 5636
print engines?

Does anyone know where I can find line-at-a-time drivers that might
work with the Techject 5336? Is there a way to con vine one of the
previously mentioned page-at-a-time drivers to print to the Techjet
5336 one line-at-a-time?

Does anyone know where I can find a relatively new compatible ROM for
the Techjet 5336?

The documentation says that the Techjet 5336 can accept upto 64 MB of
memory. In my experience the documented memory limit may be exceeded,
is that the case for the Techjet 5336?

Any help would be appreciated.

Please and Thank You

The Brockton Initiative
http://brockton.dyndns.org

Start here
http://www.calgraphinc.com/Support/CompleteTechJet.html
http://www.calgraphinc.com/Support/plotterfils.html
--
Mary Sauer MSFT MVP
http://office.microsoft.com/
http://msauer.mvps.org/
news://msnews.microsoft.com

"goonmunster" wrote in message
oups.com...
Please help me with the following problems. I recently received a
TechJet 5336 PS w/ postscript option. I am making the Techjet
available to our local Resident/Community Association to print posters
11x17 - 36x48 which are placed at various locations in the community,
in relation to various events.

I've been experimenting with various drivers and found that the Canon
W3050 - W9000, HP GL/2, HP 750C/PS all work with to some degree with
the Techjet 5336 under win2000 and/or Linux and/or OSX. However, I
noticed that it takes a very long time to print. This appears to be
related to the page-at-a-time mechanism used to print.

Does anyone know of other compatible
Postscript/CAD/Canon/Epson/Techjet/HP/Other drivers that work with the
Techjet 5336 PS that might work with the printer, under linux, win2k,
or winxp.

Does anyone know whether or not other manufacturers used a compatible
print-engine?

Can anyone tell me the difference between the Techjet 5336, 5436, 5636
print engines?

Does anyone know where I can find line-at-a-time drivers that might
work with the Techject 5336? Is there a way to con vine one of the
previously mentioned page-at-a-time drivers to print to the Techjet
5336 one line-at-a-time?

Does anyone know where I can find a relatively new compatible ROM for
the Techjet 5336?

The documentation says that the Techjet 5336 can accept upto 64 MB of
memory. In my experience the documented memory limit may be exceeded,
is that the case for the Techjet 5336?

Any help would be appreciated.

Please and Thank You

The Brockton Initiative
http://brockton.dyndns.org

In article .com, Goonmunster
wrote:
Please help me with the following problems. I recently received a
TechJet 5336 PS w/ postscript option. I am making the Techjet
available to our local Resident/Community Association to print posters
11x17 - 36x48 which are placed at various locations in the community,
in relation to various events.

I've been experimenting with various drivers and found that the Canon
W3050 - W9000, HP GL/2, HP 750C/PS all work with to some degree with
the Techjet 5336 under win2000 and/or Linux and/or OSX. However, I
noticed that it takes a very long time to print. This appears to be
related to the page-at-a-time mechanism used to print.

I don't quite follow that last ... page-at-a-time? Vs buffering an entire page
in memory and using the buffered copy for multiple copies as laser printers do,
for example? I expect that's not a feature you're likely to find on a plotter
of this vintage. Memory was expensive and 24bit color at large sizes eats a
LOT of it.

It's generally a bad idea to play mix 'n match with drivers and PostScript
printers, but as they don't seem to support any Windows versions past
NT4/Win95, you may not have much choice. Still, it'd be worth trying to
install the NT4 driver into Win2k.

I imagine you've probably found this already but in case not:

http://www.calgraphinc.com/Support/CompleteTechJet.html

There, they mention that the printer is compatible with several HP PCL or HPGL
drivers. You might want to follow up on those as well as PS drivers.

-----------------------------------------
Steve Rindsberg, PPT MVP
PPT FAQ: www.pptfaq.com
PPTools: www.pptools.com
================================================

"Steve Rindsberg" wrote in message
...

I don't quite follow that last ... page-at-a-time? Vs buffering an entire
page
in memory and using the buffered copy for multiple copies as laser
printers do,
for example? I expect that's not a feature you're likely to find on a
plotter
of this vintage. Memory was expensive and 24bit color at large sizes eats
a
LOT of it.

Steve Rindsberg, PPT MVP


I believe that refers to manual feed.

John... Visio MVP

In article , MVP John Marshall wrote:
"Steve Rindsberg" wrote in message
...

I don't quite follow that last ... page-at-a-time? Vs buffering an entire
page
in memory and using the buffered copy for multiple copies as laser
printers do,
for example? I expect that's not a feature you're likely to find on a
plotter
of this vintage. Memory was expensive and 24bit color at large sizes eats
a
LOT of it.

Steve Rindsberg, PPT MVP

I believe that refers to manual feed.

Could be. But the OP also refers to line-at-a-time drivers elsewhere. Line-
or band-at-a-time was a way of printing pages to printers that didn't have
enough memory to buffer an entire page; one of the downsides is that you had
to send the whole page to the printer for every page of output; with the page
buffered in memory, you sent once, then the printer could spew add'l copies
until the paper ran out at full engine speed.

Over to you, goonmunster ...

-----------------------------------------
Steve Rindsberg, PPT MVP
PPT FAQ: www.pptfaq.com
PPTools: www.pptools.com
================================================

Thanks for all your help.

Here's what I found. The Techjet 5336 can produce what some friends on
our street call "Professional Quality Work" (18x30" in ~5mins) using
the Canon W3050 driver, on Win2K, WinXP. The output is similar to a
1200 dpi color laser.

I tried the calcomp drivers, they worked with text, but they failed
miserably with bitmaps. In addition, web searches revealed that
numerous others had similar issues/problems with the calcomp drivers A
few people tried the HP 750 drivers, but with varying degrees of
success.

AFAICT, canon's secret - the driver converts the entire document,
including text, line drawing to a bitmap of the appropriate resolution.
The canon driver, then sends the print-job to the printer a few lines
at a time. The processing is done by the host computers CPU. This
approach significantly reduces the printer/plotter processing to
switching color tables, removes the burden of scaling, and results in a
printjob that takes minutes instead of days. Most inkjet printers
appear to use this method. My guess is the Canon W3050 is the same
printer/plotter with makeup, as are many others.

Yes the Techjet 5336 is old, but like an older color laser techtronix,
or Optra, the output is hard to beat even with a plotter/printer
costing a $1000.00 or more. Since this came for $0.00 it was worth
spending a little time.

Thanks again,

EGON

--- alan w wrote
.................................................. ...........
The only driver I know of that will print raster images is the old calcomp
driver that should still be on the calcomp website. However, you will need
an old windows NT installation disk to complete the install. No one has
ever updated the driver for xp. Once installled, it works pretty well under
xp.
Alan



Carl wrote .................................................. ..........
If this printer is like the HP 750, it accepts both
PostScript and also some variety of HP PCL. Again, if like the HP, the
printer has a very small slow processor to render PostScript, and that
is why it takes a long time to get ready to print.

I have had great success with the HP using Ghostscript on a more capable
computer to render PostScript into PCL, and then sending the PCL to
the printer. This reduced the time to print a 36x48-inch image from
overnight (perhaps 8 hours) to something like 40 minutes. That's 20
minutes preparing the image, and 20 minutes printing. The actual time
during which the print head is moving remains the same, but the setup
time for the printer to render the image is essentially zero. The PCL
produced by Ghostscript is the line-at-time data that you are asking for.

carl