Date: Fri, 21 Jan 1994 13:56:30 +0000 From: P.Kay@hertfordshire.ac.uk (Peter Kay) Subject: StyleWriter: Grayscale vs Black&White (F) In a previous post, I asked for advice concerning ink economy when printing text with Grayscale or Black&White on a StyleWriter II, because I had been somewhat confused by apparently contradictory advice in the SW manual and ReadMe. I had a good response, but some of the replies did show that I wasn't the only one to be confused. First of all, thanks to all of you who responded. (You know who you are.) I now understand the mechanics of printing better than I did. Some of you were interested in a summary, so I am including 2 of the replies below, since these seem to resolve the question I raised: ======================================= >First, for the life of your cartridge, the best option is to put all text you >print into a sufficiently dark gray, and then print with Grayscale on. The >reason is that the StyleWriter will print a full-out black (using more ink) >if printing in black and white, than with a gray. > >The drawback here is that printing in gray could well be slower. With that >option turned on, there is more information to be sent to the printer about >what level of gray is being used. Depending on how smart Apple was, this >extra information could cause anywhere from a trivial slowdown to a rather >noticable one. I'd just play with it if I were you. But if you want to make >you ink last, use grayscale and put your text into something dark, but not >dead-black. [Presumably, if one is printing in the background, the slowness of printing with Grayscale on is NOT a drawback.} ====================================== >Well: "in my experience" and "from my knowledge", both rather limited, >1) quality: greyscale vs. b&w affects the quality of graphics, not text. If >you >use b&w for greyscale or color graphics, you will get either solid black >or solid white for each color. greyscale will "halftone" things. >2) speed: the SW II driver allegedly checks for each page whether it contains >greyscale information or not. If it doesn't, it behaves as if it were printed >using B&W, which is faster--not sure if the printer really is faster, or if >the driver requires less CPU power to generate the halftones. >3) ink usage: if you happen to print graphics in B&W you'll use ink faster >if there are dark colors, since you'll get lots of solid black areas > >>From #2, I assume that in printing a page of only B&W stuff (text, graphics, >whatever) the printer will behave the same with either B&W or greyscale >selected. And from that, that the ink consumption won't change. However, >if you do encounter a color graphic or colored text or whatever, your ink >consumption should be lower in greyscale mode, since it will both to halftone. > >This may be all washed up, too. I don't have a reference on #2, but I've >tried #1 (and #3 follows from #1, I think). It is definitely slower at >printing greyscales, even in a Word 5.1 document with a few graphics >created using of Word's builtin drawing package, in simple 8-color colors, >than printing the same document in B&W. Whether the check I mention is >made, I don't know (I guess a multipage document with color/gs on only >1 page would be the test for that). ======================================== Peter Kay, School of Information Sciences, (tel. no. 0707 284 358) University of Hertfordshire, UK, AL10 9AB (P.Kay@herts.ac.uk)