Printers and drivers-- :)
this is a shot of printers installed on my 'main' computer. The Samsung, Canon, PDF converter and HP Laserjet are paper printers, the remaining are engraving machines. "GT Smartream" is my IS400, "L-solution" is my LS900 laser...
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For ANY of these printers, clicking "print" brings up the basic Windows printer screen.
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This is the LS900 driver. From this screen I can choose a saved set of power settings ('untitled' at the moment), the 'plate size', which I never change from the full table size, any offset from the corner (handy if I'm using spacers but I usually just do that in Corel), the colors I want to engrave and their speed and power settings, resolution settings, type of engraving (I leave at grayscale and set shading to 100% black), orientation (I change that in Corel, less confusing), then there's rubber stamp mode, wood mode, autofocus, Z-Up position (so the head will clear high parts), blower on/off, and cylinder engraving-there's also a neat feature where I can have the table auto-adjust it's height above/below zero based on my input, makes it great for set-and-forget Cermarking titanium bracelets...
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here I've opened the 'color type' choices- photo mode is full auto, the 'tv' is 'automatic' mode, makes it's own choice, grayscale, and halftone...
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This is the GCC Explorer driver (it's not in my printer list because it's a 32bit driver and this is a 64bit machine).
Here I choose color type, resolution, mirror, invert color, print-on-mouse-click, and 'SmartACT' which is an 'extension' mode...
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this is the settings-per-color menu--
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this is the 'advanced' window, where I can re-scale sizes if need be, where the laser head goes, top/bottom or bottom/top raster, border and vector tweaks, and my favorite, 'cluster', which lets the machine NOT scan full with rows of engraving where there's large spaces between engravings- you enter a distance, anything farther than that gets run at a different time. This eliminates using separate colors for different columns of engraving :)
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-this is it's photo engraving menu, LOTS of variations...
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ANYWAY- so YES, all engraving functions are included within the driver. Many adjustments can be made on the machines themselves after the fact, but the drivers do all the main work.
also notice absent from my printer list are my 2 Triumphs, as they're proprietary...