Color Bubble-jet Printing with the Commodore 

by Donald A Weaver

(Reprinted by permission from April-May 1996 GEOS Publication, c/o Willis C. Patton 7969 Woodcrest Drive
Louisville KY 40219; E-mail wcpat@iglou.com)

I am involved in a hobby that requires mailing out rather involved lists with a personalized heading that
includes information and other data that all of us involved try to spruce up with graphics, word and
border art. 

I had owned a color printer for quite some time but did not realize at first that by using GEOS in the 40-
column mode, I could faithfully reproduce what was on the color screen. The printer was a Citizen
200GH 9-pin with color adapter, which I later augmented with a Star 24-pin NX2420. These were
capable of fairly decent printing jobs using the NX1000 Rainbow driver but the dots and linefeed marks
that faintly showed through the color graphics and larger type sizes left something to be desired.

Than I started receiving mailings from some of the other members which showed considerable
improvement in their color and black and white production. I learned they were using bubble-jet
printers from various manufacturers. Most used MS-DOS or Macintosh computers, but I reasoned I
should be able to do it with the C128. So after reading articles in The Underground, Twin Cities
64/128 and Commodore World, and doing quite a bit of personal research via calls to various
manufacturers of bubble-jet printers, I decided on a Canon BJC-4000, due to the fact it was one of the
very few that had some sort of Epson emulation.

I purchased one but told the salesman if I could not make it work with my Commodore, I would return
it. I hooked it up to the printer port via a Xetec Super Graphix Jr. interface, still using the NX1000
Rainbow driver, and without any further adjustments, the first copy was an absolutely brilliant color job.
I went into production immediately, and was satisfied for a while, but the more I looked at the finished
product, I realized something was not quite right. Then it occurred to me that while all the shades of
blue and green were fine, the reds were just that--red! No orange, magenta, etc., ever showed up.

The next move was to try different printer drives. I tried several different ones with no improvement, but
finally tried the disk entitled "GEOS Printer Drivers & Extras" from Creative Micro Designs. I found
two drivers--Epson 24-pin color and Epson 8-pin color. The 24-pin version worked fine, showing all
the shades of color that you see on the GEOS 40-column screen, but was very slow. The 8-pin was
faster and the quality was virtually as good; consequently that was the one I settled on for production
runs.

In an effort to speed up the printing process I obtained a GeoCable, which I found I could not use
because I did not have a GC driver that would print shades of red. There may be one around
somewhere, but I'm unaware of it.

I kept the Canon bubble-jet printer, as I also found it would print simple BASIC and other word
processor programs, and was very fast with black and white printing. I refill the ink cartridges with bulk
ink to cut down on expenses, as color ink cartridges are a but more costly than most color ribbons.
Incidentally, the 24- and 8-pin Epson drivers also work very will with the Citizen and Star printers.

From The Interface, newsletter of Fresno Commodore User Group, via the Commodore Information
Center, http://home.att.net/~rmestel/commodore.html