Just as office automation was livening up, with colored file folders, colored labels, colored typewriter ribbons and bright-colored office furniture, computer printers put us back into black and white.
Just when offset printing shops were introducing color capability and office copiers began color-printing, desktop publishing limited enthusiasts to black and white.Sure, many programs look colorful onscreen. But how do you get those lovely colors into print? Already, some programs (such as Mi-crosoft Word) include routines for sending color-printing signals to printers. But where are the high quality color printers? Color-printing dot matrix printers have been around. Their print needles hammer on ribbons containing strips of three or four colors. They strike three or four times across for each line, on the red strip, then the blue, then the yellow and the black. Used with color-capable software like Word, the results are definitely colored.
But few dot matrix color printers can turn out more than 100 dots per inch. That's pretty coarse and looks mighty computery. It's economical for cranking out color proofs of artwork headed downtown for printing. But it looks like the work of a cheap color printer.
Some ink-jet printers also come equipped to do color. They work via bottles that blow colored inks. Most of them - like most dot matrix color printers - are compatible with Epson dot-matrix printers, so they can usually work with the same software. And the newer color ink-jet printers make more than 100 dots per inch. You get fairly good output - if you use them with new enough software to output signals for more than 100 dots per inch.
But we've found a much better answer! Dot matrix and ink-jet printers absolutely pale alongside the newest technology-thermal dye transfer printing. At least, that's how Frank felt when CalComp sent us Model 5902 PlotMaster for testing.
He hooked it up, made a few runs and pronounced the color saturation excellent, the resolution superb. Frank is a technology addict. He tends to swoon at clever new inventions. Judi's a skeptic. "Let Jeff test it, too," she said.
Besides designing graphics software full-time, son Jeff mans our West Coast office. Jeff insists that the point of computer technology should be to make itself useful without forcing us into aesthetic compromises. Hear, hear! Out to him went the CalComp.
Jeff loaded in a bunch of computer images he'd created back in college. A half dozen years ago, he'd printed them using a state-ofthe-art Juki dot matrix printer with color ribbon. The printer had made its own zigzagging patterns out of his outlines, nearly destroying the images. His test results using the CalComp: "They look like they could have been painted or silk-screened. They look the way I meant them to look."
That's because the printing created by dye transfer printers matches laser printing quality. No laser is actually involved. Instead, the CalComp incorporates a platenwide heat strip with about 200 discrete elements per inch. Each element can be switched on or off 200 times for each inch of paper that rolls by. (A laser printer lays down, at most, 300 dots per inch when used for graphics. But some printer and software combinations can barely do 100 per inch.) The colors come from a roll of dye-impregnated plastic that you sandwich between the heat strip and your paper. Each roll you load has a strip of red, a strip of yellow, a strip of blue, and a strip of black for each page the roll prints. When a particular heating element turns on and gets its signal from the computer, it zaps the correct dye onto the paper.
This heat-and-transfer process goes so smoothly that a sheet of lettersize paper zips through the Cal-Comp in about a minute. As with quality laser printers, you can't see that the picture is made up of dots unless you examine the printed image very closely.
The rolls of dye-impregnated plastic look just like rolls of wallpaper. Reloading is surprisingly easy. Simply rip open the packaging on a roll, slip it into a holder, fit the holder back into the printer and get back to work. If you plan to crank out several pages of plain black ink, you can substitute a plain black roll. The printer speeds up considerably since it needn't roll the plastic past three colors to reach the next black strip.
Before this color printer, the folks at CalComp have been making other high quality printers, plotters and other graphics output devices. Their technology is considered a standard in the graphics industry. Their units can plug into almost any computer that can handle plotters. For buyers, this means that the best art, graphics, chart-making and similar pictorial programs will work with a CalComp.
For doubled surety, the CalComp we tested also mimics a Hewlett Packard plotter, something even recreational graphics software supports.
For his tests, Jeff used a souped-up old Zenith Z-160 attached to a Princeton Ultra 16 monitor (a superb color graphics monitor). Being a graphics pro, he's more partial to the Amiga. But he finally admits that Commodore, its maker, has a death wish for that machine. Both Amiga and Zenith sent their output to the PlotMaster using a standard printer cable.
Are you ready now to add color to your computerized lifestyle? At $5,000 to $14,000 for various models, CalComps are already affordable for many offices. Each $43 colored ribbon prints about 145 sheets, two bits per colored print. You can do colored overhead transparencies for a buck a sheet.
Can't afford one this year? Stick with black and white until your budget goes up or costs come down. We expect both to happen soon. We predict that the very early 1990s will see full-color desktop publishing.
(C) 1989 P/K Associates Inc., 4343 W Beltline Hwy, Madison WI 53711.