Re: Drivers for 1270 and 1290

[Robert L Krawitz <rlk@alum.mit.edu>]

   From: "Nij" <nigel@mwords.co.uk>
   Date: Wed, 22 May 2002 23:12:15 +0100

   Yes, almost certainly, unless the driver you are referring to is
   'specialist' and actively checks the printer to see what it
   identifies itself as. The command sets for 1290 and 1270 are VERY
   similar, and as far as I could tell when i last looked (a little
   while ago now) the 1290 only extended certain commands... it did
   not change any command structures substantially. Why not try it?

To the best of my knowledge, that's true: any print file that will
work on the 1270 should work identically on the 1290.  If you do have
a driver that insists on checking, try printing to a file, and then
spooling the raw file; the driver can't "check" that.

   Personally, I can't see how a printer could be damaged by use of
   the incorrect driver. As far as I can tell, the printers have just
   enough intelligence not to try and print 13" wide, for example, if
   it is only an 8.x" printer. But of course, don't come running to me
   if something does go wrong ;)

There are two ways I can think of that there might be some amount of
damage caused by a driver:

1) A bug in the driver that causes it to not emit any vertical feed
   commands would just keep laying down ink on the same spot (but this
   would be an outright bug in the driver, because all Epson printers
   require vertical feed commands).

2) Using a driver for some old-style printers (such as the Stylus
   Color) on others (such as the Photo EX) in certain resolutions
   (particularly 720 DPI).  Some very old printers support firmware
   weave ("microweave"), but others don't; if you print using
   microweave to a printer that doesn't handle it correctly, it will
   only use one nozzle, and aside from being deathly slow it might
   lead to head clogs.

Those are extreme cases; in general the worst result will usually be
either garbage or the paper being ejected without printing anything.

-- 
Robert Krawitz <rlk@alum.mit.edu>      http://www.tiac.net/users/rlk/

Tall Clubs International  --  http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf@uunet.uu.net
Project lead for Gimp Print/stp --  http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
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