4695

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The Tektronix 4695 is a color inkjet printer that Tek OEM'ed from Sharp. The 4696 is a plug-compatible improved replacement for the 4695.

The Master's Thesis of Jeffery David Keast describes the Tek 4695 as follows:

The Tektronix 4695 ink-jet printer has a resolution of 120 dots per inch and each dot can be one of 15 different colors or white, no color. The colors are created by any combination of four colored inks: black, yellow, magenta and cyan.

The ink is sprayed through a 4 by 4 matrix of jets. Each colored ink has its own column of four jets. Only after four horizontal lines worth of pixel data are loaded does the carriage sweep out in a raster.

The ink-jet printer is controlled by the PC through a Centronics type 8 bit parallel interface. The printer can be commanded to operate in one of two modes. In what Tektronix calls alpha mode, the PC can send ASCII character codes which are processed by the printer and converted to character dot patterns representing the images of the characters. The dot patterns for each character are stored in the printer's ROM. One line of characters is printed in four raster passes or sixteen rows of worth of data.

In graphics mode, the PC can load color values for each pixel for a rasters worth of data, and then have them printed. In this way, the PC can create is own character fonts, line graphics or pseudo-half-tone images.

Pictures