Review: PowerPrint 4.0

Print on a PC Printer

Company: Infowave Wireless Messaging, Inc.

Price: $99 list

Pros: Allows a Mac to print with virtually any printer. Easy to set up and use. Print quality may even be higher with PowerPrint.

Cons: None.

Rating: 5 out of 5

June 23, 1998

Want to print with a printer that doesn't have a Mac serial port? Worried about the reduction of printers on the market with Mac serial ports? No problem. PowerPrint 4.0 is an excellent solution. The documentation lists over 1450 laser, inkjet, bubblejet and impact printers (black and color) that can be connected to a Mac. The requirements? Easy, they are System 7 or higher, 4 MB RAM and an ADB port (keyboard) which should leave virtually no one out.

What you get

PowerPrint comes in a small orange and turquoise box. The software is provided on both a CD ROM and a diskette for Macs without a CD ROM drive. Also included is a powered serial port to parallel port converter cable. A 32-page printed installation guide/manual completes the package.

The CD includes the PowerPrint Installer, a Readme file, Adobe Acrobat Reader v3.01 Installer and the manual in PDF format which can be read by Acrobat Reader. There are also a FileMaker Pro 3 reader and a PowerPrint Technical Information database. All of the CD files are in English, French and German.

The diskette contains just the basic PowerPrint Installer. However, a complete set of files can be obtained on diskettes from Infowave.

The printed manual has 7 pages of troubleshooting tips. The technical information database on the CD has 29 technical documents and a search engine. Then, of course, there is customer support on the web and by phone--I don't think many people will need this.

Installation and Setup

The manual has only 6 pages covering installation but that is all that is needed. Installation and setup are no-brainers. First, simply look up your printer in the manual's 12-page listing and note the correct driver. If for some reason, your printer is not among the 1450+ listed, visit Infowave's web site for the most recent list. If not there, then pick one for a printer that is similar and try it or an emulation mode that is listed in your printer's manual. Second, click on the Installer and follow the directions, picking the driver that you selected from the manual's list or Infowave's site. Third, connect the cable. Start with your Mac off and pull the keyboard cable out and plug it into the cable's ADB port. Plug the cable's ADB connector into the ADB port where the keyboard was and the serial connector into the Mac's printer (serial) port. Then plug the cable's parallel connector into the printer's parallel port. The cable draws electricity from the ADB port so no other electrical connection is needed. Fourth, power on the Mac and the printer and make sure the LED light on the cable's parallel port connector is green. Fifth, check the manual for printer settings that may be needed for certain printers (my Epson Stylus Color 500 needed nothing set). Sixth, make sure the QuickDraw GX extension is not enabled then open the Chooser, select PowerPrint's printer driver icon and close the Chooser. That's basically it.

Use

I used PowerPrint for a couple of weeks before posting this review to make sure nothing bad would show up with steady use--nothing did. It worked perfectly the entire trial period, printing text documents of all types and graphical images. My test set up is as follows:

• PowerMac 9600
• PowerLogix G3 250 MHz CPU with 1 MB backside cache running 1:1 with the CPU
• 128 MB RAM
• ATi Xclaim VR Video card
• Epson Stylus Color 500 inkjet printer

Before testing PowerPrint, the 9600 and another Mac, a PowerMac 7100, were both attached to the Epson printer through a serial switch box to the Mac serial port on the printer. When one wanted to print, one had to manually flip the switch to the correct printer. Installing PowerPrint on the 9600 allowed both Macs to be simultaneously attached to the printer since the Epson has both a Mac serial port and a PC parallel port. Of course, only one could print at a time but it saved flipping the switch which is easy to forget and forgetting causes one to have to reset the printer and sometimes the computer.

Speed: The first thing that I noticed was the the time between clicking on the "print" button and the printer beginning to print seemed to be substantially less. However, the time to print a document seemed longer in total. I created a SimpleText document to check the quality of the printed page under PowerPrint and without it. The content of the document consisted simply of the keyboard letter keys in 9-point and 24-point and plain and bold text. The second document was the first page of the Readme file that comes with another Infowave product, StyleScript v3.6. Both documents were printed using the "Normal" (this setting is called Best by the Epson driver) and "Best" (this setting is called Super by the Epson driver) settings. The time to print each document, counting from clicking the Print Button to the printer ejecting the printed page, for the regular Epson driver via the printers serial port and for PowerPrint via the parallel port are as follows:

Time to Complete Printing Document (Minutes:Seconds)

Printer Port/Resolution	Keyboard Letters	ReadMe File (1st page)
Serial/"Normal"	0:21	1:38
Parallel/Normal	0:29	1:44
Serial/"Best"	0:56	4:14
Parallel/Best	0:52	4:34

The PowerPrint driver was quicker to start printing, taking only 3-4 seconds, while the Epson driver took 9-10 seconds. However, the Epson driver over the Mac serial port on the printer caught up and marginally surpassed PowerPrint over the parallel port in most cases. For all practical purposes, I would rate them both even.

Quality: Careful examination of the printed documents revealed that PowerPrint via the printer's parallel port produced sharper, more complete and darker printed type that did the Epson driver via the printer's serial port. I do not know if this results from the PowerPrint's driver or the Epson printer's better handling of parallel port input or both. Nor do I know if this advantage would occur in other printers.

Conclusions

PowerPrint 4.0 allows a Mac to print with virtually any printer on the market. It is easy to install and use. In the limited tests that I performed, PowerPrint printed as fast as printing with the Mac drivers over the Mac serial port. The print quality from PowerPrint was better than that produced from the printer's driver over the Mac serial port on the printer tested. PowerPrint 4.0 is an outstanding product. I could find no fault with it and rated it a 5 out of 5. PowerPrint works with one Mac and one printer. Infowave also produces PowerPrint Pro which allows multiple Macs to use one printer over a network. Yes, using PowerPrint will cost you more money to use a printer with no Mac serial port. However, this is Apple's fault, of course, and not PowerPrint's. In the future, there will be no Mac serial ports. Apple has committed to the Universal Serial Bus (USB) port which will also be the predominant port on PCs. However, there are 20 million Macs in use, none of which have a USB port. PowerPrint provides lots of printing options for those Macs in the time being.

Copyright © 1998 by Bill Fox.
All rights reserved--no commercial use permitted without attribution.

Of course . . . . . . and I am proud to be an Evangelista! . . .