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NOT all that long ago the idea of printing in colour was a wild dream for most of us who own a personal computer.

   The only people who could handle colour were the output houses and they, of course, could afford to buy the very expensive colour output devices that were designed for them.

  This did not stop the printer manufacturers, however, from trying to make colour printers for the rest of us.

    Some of the early colour printers were dot-matrix printers that used a colour ribbon. The ribbon was divided lengthways in three strips to provide the cyan, magenta and yellow.

  Black was achieved by combining all and, naturally enough, black became brown. The resolution was about 180 dpi and the result was, shall we say, primitive.

   We have come a long way since those times.

  Today there is a range of colour printers available from ink-jet to colour lasers to dye-sublimation.

    Epson has always been at the forefront of colour printer development. It is no surprise to see a product like the Stylus Pro XL.

   It can handle paper up to A3 and takes two cartridges, one for the three colours needed to print in full colour - CMY - and one for black only, thus eliminating the 'brown' problem. (In a perfect world, adding cyan, magenta and yellow ought to produce black. But the world is not perfect and the result is usually brown. That is why most ink-jet printers now supply a separate black cartridge.)   The highest resolution of this new Epson printer prints at 360 dpi or 720 dpi, if special coated paper is used.

  Setting up the printer was not particularly difficult. We installed the software on a Macintosh and on a Windows machine with equal ease.

  Those who saw our test results were impressed with the quality of the printout.

   The images were crisp and beautiful. There is more to colour printing, however, than producing beautiful pictures.

  Although this printer may be just the right thing for some people, there were reservations.

    One problem was over-saturation of some of the colours. The ink came right through the paper in some areas, usually where the tones were very red. Humidity could be the problem. Setting magenta to 85 per cent helped correct it. But this problem could change with the climate.

  One would do well to be aware of this change and make adjustments.

    The placement of the dots was good. When this is not done well you can sometimes see what appear to be lines running through what should be smooth surfaces. The Epson was very good in this area.

    There were problems with the placement of the image on the paper. The way the paper fits into the tray makes it impossible to compensate for this. But exactly what the problem was is not certain.

  In the samples, the left-hand margin was about two millimetres and the right-hand one was about two centimetres. We were unable to adjust it.

  The time required to print for an A3 page was about 45 minutes. This was for a 720 dpi image that was 28.5 megabytes in size.

    There were some discrepancies that were difficult to judge. We were told that the Macintosh version of the software did not fully support 720 dpi but all the printing we did was, in fact, from a Macintosh. There seemed to be little problem.

    This is a beautiful printer for people who are not in a hurry. It would be ideal for a service bureau that required colour proofs.

   It would produce accurate colours and, if you did not mind waiting for about an hour, it would be just the right thing.

  The list price for the Stylus Pro XL in Hong Kong is $16,000. The printer is available at most large computer shops.



Colour output Epson style