Testing the Epson Stylus with the Commodore 

by Dick Estel

With prices dropping to reasonable levels, Commodore users began venturing into the ink jet printer
world a few years ago. Experimentation and study of available information has led most Commodore
users to the various printers sold by Canon. You can find reviews of various models in back issues of
The Interface, LOADSTAR, Commodore World and other publications.

I acquired a Canon bubble jet with my first PC in the fall of 1996. It made good quality printouts, but it
seems to have a strange feature--every so often it thinks it is out of paper, and refuses to print. You can
take the paper out, put it back in, push on the spring operated piece of plastic it rests again, turn the
machine on and off, and it still stubbornly declares that there is no paper. The usual solution is to turn
everything off, do something else, then try again the next day. At this point, it normally works to
perfection. I know two other users who have had this problem with their Canon's.

In the spring of 1997 I began reading about a new Epson printer, the Color 600, which claimed to use
a new technology to produce finer dots, and to print color pictures on glossy photo paper with no
special cartridge, achieving "near-photographic" results. At that time many printers required a special
ink cartridge to use photo paper. Considering the Canon's faults, and relatively poor color quality, I
developed a serious desire for the Epson.

Being a new product, stores were asking full list price for it, but finally in August I found it for $20
lower, and brought one home. The first one I owned gave me some serious problems after about two
and a half months--the printed format would print offset from the actual paper, so that only about half
the image actually printed.
 
I phoned the Epson company, and after the obligatory journey through several levels of voice mail, I
talked to a nice lady who told me, since I had bought the printer just under three months ago, that I
qualified for Epson Road Service. It turned out that this meant they would send me a new printer
immediately, I would receive it tomorrow, and my only obligation was to pack up and return the old
one at their expense. Sure enough, the new printer came the next day; the old one went back, and I
have had no problems of any kind since (November of 1997).

The Epson Color 600 offers excellent single-sheet paper handling. I print the address and the message
on our post card notices with it, and the cards go through without a hitch. I have printed video tape
cassette labels, the kind that come on a wax paper type backing with several different size and shape
labels. The acid test is the sheet I use to print labels for envelopes. Labels for an ink jet come in a sheet
of a dozen or more, depending on size. Mine have 30, and I rarely need 30 labels at a time. But I also
hate sending a nice printed letter in an envelope with a label written by hand or typed on my antique
Royal portable.

I finally decided I could print the labels I need, one or a dozen; then run the sheet again, starting where I
left off (it involves entering returns till I get to the row and column where I want to start). I ran this sheet
through the printer at least 10 times, and in the end it was showing a bit of wear and tear, but it went
through like a charm every time.

Epson printers have generally been described as not working well with Commodore. I detest moving
any equipment, but I felt an obligation to test this printer on my C-128. So I spent a couple of hours
connecting it to my C-128 via the Xetec Super Graphix Gold interface, and testing various programs. I
left the interface just as I use it with my Star NX1020 Rainbow, which is transparent mode, no
linefeeds. This works with The Write Stuff , GEOS, and most other programs.

The first test, with TWS, produced perfect results. I follow author Eric Lee's advice to "put your
interface in transparent and select true ASCII" in the printer setup screen of TWS. The only concession
I made to the ink jet was to set it for 62 lines instead of the normal 66. I got a nice, dark printout with
no visible jaggies. The Epson understood all the same formatting commands I have been using with my
Star 1020 Rainbow for years--centering, bold, proportional print, and various font sizes.

Next came graphics, which I was certain would be the true challenge. All graphic printing tests
produced an elongated image that ran onto a second page, with one exception that I'll get into shortly.
This has been a common experience for Commodore users with ink jets and 24 pin printers.

I started with GEOS, using the drivers that have been recommended for Canon bubble jets. The results
were "interesting" to say the least. The color driver, Epson24PinColor printed the full page graphic that
I tried. The only problem was that it printed a one and a half-inch strip of the graphic, then a bunch of
garbage letters, another short strip, then lots of garbage, then another strip and so on. I turned off the
printer after 21 sheets had gone through the printer, some of them containing only three characters.

Next I tried the recommended black & white driver, Epson 8-Pin 80 DPI, which made a very light
picture, like a watermark, elongated and run over to the first two inches of a second page. I suspect the
light results were due to the printer having no way to fill in the spaces between the large, widely spaced
dots of the Commodore as opposed to the PC graphics it is designed for.

Next was Epson8-Pin3Pass, the driver I use most with my Star, and the driver I recommend to
everyone who prints from GEOS on a non-Commodore printer. This produced results of normal
"darkness," but sections of the page were printed about a quarter inch offset from the section above
and below. It ran onto a second page.

The final GEOS effort was with the color driver I normally use with the Star, Epson 8-pin color. This
created a printout in which the saturated colors went pastel, but everything lined up fine. It just needed
14-inch paper like all the graphics I tried.

Two tests to go: Print Shop and PrintMaster. For each program I entered the printer setup mode and
chose the only Epson model shown. The test sheets for both printed OK, but they are both only a single
line across the top of the page. I created a simple card with each program. Print Shop printed half the
card, then everything locked up. PrintMaster produced the entire card, but as expected, with vertical
stretching that would have fit on 14 inch paper.


I also tried the little program that has been published in The Interface and other newsletters that is
supposed to overcome the elongated printing with 24-pin printers. This produced no improvement.

Conclusions? Since I had no intention of using this printer with my Commodore, I did not experiment
with DIP switch settings. This would probably have had little success, since the vertical distortion was
the main problem. I believe there are ways to change the line spacing, which might overcome this
problem. The failure of the program to change spacing could have several possible causes--a misprint in
the source; the application program or the printer undoing whatever it did (it must be run before the
program is loaded), or just not meant to work with ink jets.

Nearly any ink jet will give good text results. The special quality of the Epson Stylus 600 is its color
graphics capabilities. Considering this, it is probably overkill to buy this printer for use with a
Commodore.

POSTSCRIPT:

Several months after completing the first draft of this article, I learned of some other GEOS drivers that
are supposed to work well with ink jet printers. None of them worked; one locked up everything, and
the others produced garbage. (For the record, the drivers are Bjet/LQ1 (the lockup), Deskjet-LQ, and
Deskjet+.)

Now I decided to throw all caution to the wind and took my Star out to the living room and connected
it to the PC. Remember, although Star was once a big supporter of Commodore, this and most of their
printers were intended to be connected to a PC. The Star handled text, including unusual and large
fonts, quite well, producing results that were better than it does with the Commodore. This is not
surprising when you consider this: When you buy a PC with the latest version of Windows, you get the
latest version of dozens of printer drivers. When you use the printer with the Commodore, you are
using drivers that were mostly written about 10 years ago.

The results with color photos were way too dark and unacceptable for any use. However, simple color
artwork printed with acceptable color, although there are noticeable stripes from each pass of the print
head.

All printing from the PC to the Star was very slow--about the same speed as with the Commodore. 

From "The Interface," newsletter of Fresno Commodore User Group