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)