Multi-strike, multi-pass, colour correction (WIP: Dot matrix program)

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SomethingUnreal
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Published on ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gyzlScdiTQ


Duration: 15:57
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Showing off a couple more things not possible with the Epson driver: multi-strike printing and "quiet" (not really) mode, along with CMYK colour correction which is nearly invisible to my camcorder, so that part was a waste of video...

This is a program I'm casually working on every now and then to print images on any 24-pin ESC/P2 dot matrix printer (ESC/P2 is Epson's control language for their dot matrix printers). It directly controls the printer by sending raw commands to it; you just need to tell Windows that it's a "Generic / Text Only" printer on Windows, not using the official Epson driver, and Windows will pass the commands straight on to the printer without trying to translate them.

This is a standalone program for printing image files, not a driver for printing from any program. I've not yet released it, but I intend to some time. Compared to the driver, it currently allows:
- Printing in (lower) resolutions for high speed (down to 60 DPI).
- Detailed control over colour dithering/thresholding.
- Very tall print-outs not restricted to a paper length (e.g. for continuous paper).
- Printing only individual component colour(s) of an image.
-* Faster colour printing by doing large blocks of each colour at once.
-* Multi-strike printing (optionally offsetting each one to fill in the gaps between the earlier ones' dots).
-* "Quiet" (multi-pass) printing (unfortunately, I can't control the actual speed).

*The last three are somewhat "hacks", abusing commands to try to force unofficial behaviour, and as such, they rarely work properly in combination with each other. In particular, the last two often don't work when printing colour.

By the way, printing in blocks of colour is no longer done by relying on sending commands with the correct timing (as it did in the previous video), which means it's now much more reliable and doesn't get messed-up by pausing the printer, image content, etc.
Previous video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EGSB-g2IfQ

The printer in this video is an Epson LQ-300+II.



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Tags:
printer
dot matrix
Epson
colour
programming
color
CMYK