The following suppliers are believed to be able to supply consumables. This list is compiled from hearsay - so cannot be totally relied upon! Please refer any updates to the list.
www site: http://www.printerpeople.co.uk
30th March, 2000 toner price reported as £110.74 plus £10.00 carriage plus VAT.
The Calligraph has erratic bugs: some of these are to do with timing. Several of the software upgrades introduced delays to attempt to overcome these. However, this was not entirely sucessful.
The problem is elusive: for some the software has been unuseable, others report no problems!
There is no definitive answer to the problem. Various things have ben tried by different people, with varying degrees of success.
Text in drawfiles is not printed out by applications such as Ovation Pro and PipeDream. The crude solution was to change text to paths. However Dave Pilling produced a module FontFix which is freely available from Dave Pilling's www site. This does fix the problem!
Two separate versions of the hardware card exist: the early one (supplied with a Qume printer) was pre Risc PC and will not work on an RPC. When the RPC was brought out, Calligraph had a new card designed.
*Podules - the RPC card answers as 'A4-1200'
*GLP says it's a 'Laser Interface v3'.
Early Calligraph systems were supplied with a Qume engine. Later systems with a cut-down Dataproducts or Sharp printer.
The DataProducts and Sharp printers seem, by and large, to be interchangeable.
However while the toner for the Sharp seems to fit the Dataproducts machine, the dataproducts toner does not fit the Sharp - unless some fairly careful hacking of the toner casing is done.
No problems have been reported with RiscOS4. However, if networking, be sure to use ShareFS 3.44 or later: there are bugs in 3.43 which the Calligraph software does not like!
The Sharp/Dataproducts engine keeps a count of how many sheets it has printed, so 'knows' how worn the drum is and how far used the toner is. However - 'consumables' drums do not always fail to a count - the count is the worst case, to make sure they don't fail before their time. It is possible to reset these counts, thus cheating the lifetime count. The count may also get confused for other reasons.
Symptoms of a confused VRRAM are messages such as 'Empty Toner' or 'Expired Drum' when this clearly is not possible, or long toner mixing periods followed by a dirty, black page.
So, to inspect the counters stop at COUNTER SET which is the last (next is back to 'PCU DIAG MODE n').
Press MENU. On each press the display will change, with the number count flashing either the most significant portion or the least significant, cycling through:
Thus, to check the drum count, you would stop at DRM. Again, if the NVRAM is corrupted, this may show 30 000.
Entering *GLP at the Command line mode gives developed and printed read-outs immediately. Hopefully they are improved?
Depends what you altered.
Since Calligraph software has just about the largest 'Dongle' imaginable, Calligraph were very free and easy about giving out software. I have therefore made available on this site the last known versions.
The last version of the driver, !PrinterDP was 3.21
The last version of the Net driver (!Ecoprint) was 3.20.
PPL are the main service and sales agents for the Dataproducts printers. Their sales address has been given above under 'Consumables'.