** 1 page, HP693C printer review / 887 words **

HP without the sauce, courtesy of Les Charles...

** HP690.GIF/JPG here **

Purchasing a new printer can be a tricky decision for Atarians 
because the PC dominance of the market means an increasing number 
of printers can only be used with Windows.
Worse still the manufacturers no longer include comprehensive 
documentation, not even the control codes, which makes it hard for 
Atari programmers to support new printers.
However, despite the gloomy outlook, inkjet printers remain the 
ideal choice for small office and home use, offering both high 
quality and reasonable running costs.

The Hewlett Packard HP690, HP870 and HP890 series all offer mono 
and colour printing but how do they perform with Atari computers?

Open the box

I bought a HP693C which comes supplied with black and colour 
cartridges. Setting up is simply a matter of inserting both ink 
cartridges, and connecting the leads - or it would be except a 
printer lead is not supplied.
The documentation invites you to align the print heads using the 
software provided but I couldn't because the software doesn't run 
on the Atari platform. Happily this didn't turn out to be a 
problem for me but it's a potential hazard. My model included a 
CD-ROM productivity pack for the PC and as usual you're left to 
look for third party drivers to use with Atari software.

In operation

Happily all these printers are backwardly compatible with the HP 
Deskjet 500 series drivers which are normally included with NVDI, 
SpeedoGDOS and most applications software. Papyrus can download 
vector fonts to the printer and Protext goes a step further to 
enable access to the internal printer fonts. The HP 500 drivers 
produce crisp, sharp text at 300x300dpi but hang on a minute this 
printer is capable of 600x600dpi so maybe we should look for a 
better driver. It turns out the HP Laserjet 4 drivers are also 
suitable. Output at 600x600dpi needs lots of memory and with most 
ST machines fitted with 4Mb or less you'll be restricted to 
working with small images or using virtual memory software like 
Outside.

Imagecopy loads the entire image before printing, then feeds it to 
the printer one line at a time. The line buffer is larger for 600 
dpi printing, but the image buffer is the same size so overall it 
doesn't require much more memory to print at 600 dpi compared with 
360 or 180 dpi. However, it takes four times as long to output a 
page at 600 dpi compared to the same print at 300 dpi.

Output quality, using proprietary inkjet paper, looks as crisp as 
output from a Laserjet printer to my untrained eye. The age old 
problem with HP Deskjets not being able to print the last couple 
of lines at the bottom of a page is still there.

The solution used to be to adjust the DIP switches but you've 
guessed it, they're also ancient history. There are two buttons, 
Power and Resume, everything else is controlled by the software - 
or lack of it in our case.

One way to get around the problem is to set-up your own custom 
page around 8.25" x 10.80", alternatively you could try asking a 
friendly PC owner if you can set your printer defaults using their 
machine!

** PAPPAGE.GIF here **
Papyrus custom page

Imagecopy, using the Deskjet 500 series drivers, produced 
excellent results first time which should be satisfactory for most 
applications. Given the colour saturation and correction options 
offered by Imagecopy I expect I'll be able to further improve the 
final output with a bit of effort.

Papyrus now supports printed colour images and again the HP 
Deskjet 500 drivers produced acceptable results but Papyrus also 
includes a HP 850C driver which as you'd expect produced even 
better results.

Special photo colour cartridges and paper are available separately 
to produce near-photographic output but they're expensive and I 
don't personally need this facility so hopefully someone else will 
step in and report their experiences...

Conclusion

With the right software these series produce high quality text and 
perfectly acceptable colour output, for all but the most demanding 
requirements, using the black and colour cartridges supplied. The 
theoretical output speed for black text ranges from five pages per 
minute (ppm) for the HP690C series up to nine ppm for the HP890C 
models. The actual output speed is dependent on the exact model, 
your system and the application and driver software.

A wide range of paper sizes, including envelopes and 
transparencies, are supported and spares are available on most 
high streets and PC superstores. The build quality is excellent 
but I'd expect that from one of the leading printer manufacturers. 
The exact model numbers and bundled software seems to change with 
the weather but the song remains the same.

** Product boxout **
Hewlett Packard Deskjet 693C

Internal fonts
Courier, Times, Gothic and Univers

Interface
Centronics parallel

Dimensions
HP693: 436mm wide x 199mm high x 405mm deep

Typical street prices
HP 690C+ around œ170 including VAT
HP 870C around œ230 including VAT
HP 890C under œ300 including VAT

Pros
Spares no problem, top quality text and acceptable colour output

Cons
No way to set the printer defaults without a PC, control codes not 
documented
** end boxout **

** Images **
** NVDI.GIF **
** Caption **
Backward compatibility with HP Deskjet drivers is invaluable
** end **

** IMGCOPY.GIF **
** Caption **
Adjustments galore with Imagecopy
** end **