summary of replies
k...@cs.rochester.edu.uucp
info. I have lightly edited the responses. I think I will not make any
editorial comments but let the replies speak for themselves. Thanks to
all who contributed.
Oh, we have decided to get a couple of Laserwriter+ printers to tide us
over and to keep an eye on future developments.
Ken
From: jshe...@zodiac.ads.ARPA (John L. Shelton)
Subject: Info on printers
I am undergoing the same search process. Perhaps I can share
some info with you.
[start of excerpt]
Postscript
-----------
... Here is the entire list of manufacturers selling postscript
printers:
Agfa-Gevaert, Apollo, Apple, Dataproducts, Diconix, Digital Equipment,
ITT Qume, NBI, NEC, QMS, Sun, Texas Instruments, Linotype. Included
in this list are low-res printers, and two photo-typesetters at 1200
dpi and 2400 dpi!!!
The reasonable candidates are listed in detail below.
Agfa-Gevaert 18ppm 30,000 18ppm50
This printer is 400 dots per inch; nearly twice the resolution of the
other printers. We might be able to afford two of them. It is sold
and serviced by CompuGraphics, one of the largest manufacturers of
computerized typesetting equipment.
Apple LW 8ppm 3,500 112ppm50
AT this price we could buy 14 of them; put one in every suite. We'd
almost need to; they have to be baby-sat for all but the smallest
jobs. Cost of operation is high; like the Imagen 8/300, this is based
on the canon engine that self-destructs in 100,000 pages. (I've seen
this happen, folks.)
Apple LW+ 8ppm 5,000 80ppm50
Just like the LW, but more built-in fonts, and more memory. Reputed
to be a bit faster in processing data. We might consider a mix of
these printers.
Dataproducts LZR 2665 26ppm 17,000 78ppm50
We sampled print quality at Ampex; it wasn't great. If you grade
print quality in the following ranges:
10 Phototypeset
8 Excellent laser printer (we haven't seen yet)
6 Good laser printer (Apple sometimes, Imagen sometimes)
4 poor laser printer, good dot-matrix
2 line printer class
Then the Dataproducts would be a 5 or so. We'll be getting more print
samples soon. Best feature is fast speed with high paper volume; big
input trays, output trays. Easy paper path, low maintenance. Could
be easy to scratch the drum, since it is exposed when you try to clear
a jam. Has appletalk interface, plus serial, parallel.
ITT Qume ScriptTEN 10ppm 10,000 50ppm50
about a 6 on my quality scale. I have some print samples. Low
volume printer not really worth a lot of consideration.
QMS PS 2400 24ppm ??,??? (about 35K) 24ppm50
Based on the Xerox XP-24 engine. Not yet released; they are about a
year behind on this printer. Probably too expensive.
TI Omnilaser 2115 15ppm 8,000 90ppm50
Based on a Ricoh engine. I've heard characters appear light. TI is
undergoing a revision of the printer; Ricoh is in Austin Texas working
with TI to straiten out problems. If it works and looks good, I'd say
it is a strong candidate. Has multiple input trays, stacks output in
staggered fashion, will do face up or face down, medium paper volume.
Has appletalk interface, plus serial, parallel. There is also an 8ppm
version.
Diconix (Kodak) Dijit 1/PS 20ppm 16,000 60ppm50
Ink-jet, not laser. Lower cost of operation. DUPLEX printer; prints
on both sides. Reduced paper costs. Have sample output coming. Not
available until May. Sounds interesting. Designed to be a
high-volume printer (up to 70,000 pages per month. For reference, we
are doing about 30K now; I expect us to increase to 60K per month once
we buy new printers.) Prints nicely on cotton bond paper, unlike most
laser printers.
[end of excerpt]
Since this review, I went to see the Dataproducts printer again, and
fed it myself using a Macintosh. ...
The Dataproducts could crank out up to at least 20 ppm, but only on
the simplest of pages. If you use it in line-pritner mode, it goes
just fine. Trying to send some Mac Word documents slowed it down
substantially, to about 10 ppm, even with one font per page.
The output quality just isn't that good. Characters are not
consistent on the page; a "g" might be splotched differently depending
where it lies, for example. Also, the unit I saw had very light
output; the black just wasn't very black. This has nothing to do with
the thickness of lines. The printouts looked like not-very-good
xerographic copies overall. I can't really recommend this printer for
quality work.
One vendor I spoke with (Agfa, via Compugraphic) says that all the
other vendors are using the slower Postscript hardware from Adobe, and
that they have this faster board. This could explain the slowness of
many of the printers.
I eagerly await seeing the TI printer, because of the good ratio of
cost versus speed. Since the electronics may be the limiting factor,
it makes more sense to have twice as many pritners with 1/2 the top
speed, especially if they all print about the same speed when the page
complexity forces the issue.
The Agfa SOUNDS nice. They will be sending me sample output.
Features that appeal: lots of fonts (who has more than
Compugraphic?), high resolution, 4 year old technology for the print
engine (So they probably have the bugs out of it. Problem is cost; I
could only afford 1 or 2. IF their high-speed controller makes a
difference, this could be the fastest printer around.
I assume you've looked at DEC's printserver 40. I saw one at DECUS a
few months ago. It was pretty fast, but you need VMS to drive it. It
is built around a microvax which must be downloaded over ethernet from
a VAX.
=John Shelton=
From: "Nelson H.F. Beebe" <Be...@UTAH-SCIENCE.ARPA>
Subject: Canon LBP-CX cartridge lifetime
I cannot comment on the QMS and Dataproducts PostScript printers. We
have had an Imagen 8/300 for 4 yr and an Apple LaserWriter for 1.5 yr,
and I have an HPLJ+ at home on my PC; all these use the Canon LBP-CX
engine. We seem to average between 3000 and 4000 copies per
cartridge, but we also do a lot of graphics which uses less toner. I
can't imagine stretching this to 8000, unless perhaps they were doing
nothing but graphics. When the toner goes, it goes fast--you can
shake the cartridge, but you probably cannot get more than a dozen
more pages out of it before large white streaks appear on your output;
I guess that is good design from Canon (remember how line printer
ribbons produce black output the first day, and grey output for weeks
after).
One thing to consider is the nature of the printing engine with
respect to TeX fonts. A non-Canon engine is going to force you to
regenerate fonts with different parameters. We have a Ricoh-based PCP
2000 (same engine DEC LN03 uses). Canon fonts output on it are
readable, but so thin that narrow parts actually are broken; the
output is certainly readable, but would be unacceptable for document
reproduction.
We also have an Imagen 3320 (20ppm large Canon engine); output on it
is certainly not as black as with the LBP-CX engine, but is acceptable
if we turn up the intensity dial.
-------
From: tahoe!p...@seismo.CSS.GOV (Paul Graham)
Subject: qms800
I've used the LW and the qms. The qms was much lighter than the
LW (I've no idea why) so we used it with the darkness all the way up.
I couldn't change the page offset parameters in the qms (of course they
said they were about to change the firmware in the thing) and subjectively
it seems much slower on starup but quicker from page to page.
Despite having more memory I ran out of memory on a job that printed on
the LW. I guess all this means I'd buy another LW but not another QMS-800.
--
Paul Graham
From: mcvax!cwi.nl!ja...@seismo.CSS.GOV
Subject: Re: war stories wanted
No Postscript printer can push out text at the rated speed. It only can do
this if it doesn't need to recalculate the page.
There is no bottleneck in the 9600 baud line, since the time it takes to
calulate the pages.
The QMS is slightly faster then the LaserWriter, but not a lot.
PostScript is the real bottleneck. The 2660 is much faster then the laserwriter
when is does simple things like enscript or dumb lpr output.
No, it depend on the amount a output you crank trough the macghine. When the
machine is heavely loaded, 8000 to 10000 pagers is possible. You need
sometimes to shake the cassette a bit to get a more uniform black on the page.
The Agfa P400 is an impossible machine.
The original version had a stupid user interface, which made it unusable for
anything more sophisticated then a lineprinter. The PostScript version was
supposed to be announced here the 1st of januari this year, but even the
factory in Belgium, were they are made doesn't know when it will become
available, when I called them a month ago. Looks like vaporware to me.
We have two LaserWiters for the central printing facilities.
They are connected to the portselsctor, so the various machines (mostly vaxes)
can just "call it up" and the MICOM will choose the available one.
Weekly are about 3000 to 10000 pages printed. I don't know how long these
machines will survive this set up (They are official rated at 3000 pages a
month). After a while (say 20000) pages the printers are really "burned in".
The mechanics start to makie interesting sqeeking noices, but it keeps
working.
The Dataproduct was just brought in last friday to replace this set-up.
The main features is that it is rated at this amount of output, so it probably
won't start to make the noices as the LaserWriters. The main improvement is
that it will take 1500 to 2000 pages in the input bin.
Now you don't have to insert new paper every half hour to the machine, and
maybe it is enought to survive the night, without the need to sit around in
the morning filling the LaserWriters with paper while the machines are
flushing there queues which was waiting on the Out of Paper situation.
I have played with a with an QMS P800 on an other site. It seams a little bit
faster then the LaserWriter, but not really significant.
jaap
From: ucsbcsl!gro...@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU
Subject: PostScript,xtp,xdvi
Ken:
... We have Apple and so
far have been pretty happy with it. The first one came DOA, but since
then (2 years ago) we have not had any problems. I have not kept track of
how many pages we get from a cartridge. As far as bitmaps go, I have tried
to get the GREMLIN extensions going with the Transcript software from
Adobe. The only hard part has been setting up the bitmaps for area fills
to go with the filled polygons. This procedure seems to be incredibly slow
and laborious. Just using a gray scale is easy and fast, but to get the
actual bitmap pattern is SLOOOWWW! I tried to get the CIFPLOT patterns
to work (these are the patterns used with UCB CAD routines for VLSI), and
found that a page printout took many minutes. I do not claim to be a
PostScript expert. I just used the sample program in the Cookbook for
doing bitmaps/area fills.
Mark Grosen
From: Jean-Francois Lamy <utai!la...@seismo.CSS.GOV>
Subject: Re: war stories wanted
A LaserWriter + handles 19200 bauds. I have never seen TeX output come
out faster that 4 pages a minute, 2 being more typical (if there are
lots of font changes). Single font text from troff and TeX fares about 4 ppm
Jean-Francois Lamy la...@ai.toronto.edu (CSNet, UUCP)
From: seismo!mnetor!utzoo!henry
Subject: Re: war stories wanted
> What is your average yield from a Canon LBP-CX (Laserwriter)
> cartridge? 3000-4000 is suggested as good, but someone quoted 8000. Is
> that unrealistic?
Yes. Over a couple of years of fairly heavy operation, we consistently
get just about 5000 pages per cartridge. It's seldom under 4500 or over
5500. We've had it pass 6000 just once. 8000 sounds like a fantasy to me,
unless the average density on the page is awfully low.
Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
From: "Col. G. L. Sicherman" <colonel%buffal...@RELAY.CS.NET>
Subject: printers
We have a QMS 1200, and it's as good as it's cracked up to be. I
can't say anything about the 800.
:L
From: Glenn Trewitt <tre...@amadeus.stanford.edu>
Subject: Re: war stories wanted
At the end of this message is one from William LeFabre at Rice
University about LaserWriter durability. [LeFebvre's message has
appeared in a previous note to laser-lovers - Ken] I pretty much agree
with his comments. We drove our two LaserWriters into the ground and
eventually had to get the fuser rollers replaced. Other than that, we
have been very happy.
I would strongly suggest that you get the LW+, since it has more fonts
and is has many performance improvements over the original LW. It can
handle serial communications much more flexiby and up to 56Kbaud,
rather than just 9600. It interleaves computation and printing. And
general improvements to overall speed are made.
IF the QMS PS800 is based on the Xerox print engine (square box about 2
feet on a side) DON'T buy it. I haven't talked to anybody who hasn't
had a lot of maintenance problems with it (including us).
- Glenn Trewitt
From: seismo!mnetor!yetti!mike (Mike Clarkson )
Subject: Re: war stories wanted
Check out the Texas Instruments 2115. We're thinking of ordering one.
3Meg Ram, Cartidges, 2 bins, 2nd generation ricoh engine with a very heavy duty
cycle. They will even burn TeX cm fonts onto cartridges forabout 400$.
Mike Clarkson.
From: William Roberts <liam%cs.qmc...@Cs.Ucl.AC.UK>
Subject: Re: war stories wanted
We have 4 LaserWriter+ which we run from various UNIX machines
via 9600 baud terminal lines.
Cartridges:
We get between 5000 and 5500 pages per cartridge regardless of
print mix (so it seems). Shaking the cartridge can add a couple
of hundred copies but as we eat a cartridge in 2 weeks (on each
printer) I get fed up of shaking things just for an extra
couple of hours printing.
We run them until you get large white areas where print out to
go - I don't believe 8000 pages. You can see a degradation
after about 4000 copies; the print just goes a bit fainter.
Print Speed:
We can get 8ppm out of our beast, but only for very special
jobs: for example, we have an annual mass mailshot to
prospective students, and my handcrafted PostScript tacked onto
ditroff output just does a Reader's Digest job on the name,
address and a few other fields. By using "copypage" to retain
the rest of the image, this does print at full speed. Otherwise
we get more like 4ppm on normal jobs (including ditroff). There
is a hiccup whilst new fonts get cached, e.g. moving from
Diablo-like Courier font to Ditroff Times-Roman, but this isn't
noticably a drawback.
Line Rate:
9600 baud is the bottleneck unless you write PostScript
programs that compute fractal mountains directly! It takes me
about 10 minutes to print a 512x512x8 bit TV picture and that
is almost all transmission time (NB. 8 bits converted to ASCII
hex = 16 bits). If you can use AppleTalk then do so - MacPaint
prints bitmaps a damn sight faster than I can from our VAX.
William Roberts ARPA: li...@cs.qmc.ac.uk (gw: cs.ucl.edu)
From: David Sandilands <munnari!RSBS0.anu.oz!SANDI...@seismo.CSS.GOV>
Subject: Laser Printers.
Ken,
We have 5 LaserWriters and a DEC LN03 .
For word processing the LN03 is reasonable, especially with a
program such as WPS. However the number of 'fonts' is limited,
and its capabilities in areas such as italics are poor. It is
Ricoh based and supposed to require maintenance less often than
the Canon engines. There is no way to extend the number of
copies from the available toner. You cannot reliably feed them
with 'bank' paper (very light weight). They tend to chew the
corners off and put them in funny places around the film.
The LaserWriters are all working well (4 LW+, 1 soon to be +).
We have obtained up to 9200 copies from a toner cartridge, with
7500 about the norm. We have obtained quite a lot of useful
information from this news group, about LWs, which you may be able
to get from the archives, if you go this way (articles on maintenance,
cartridge refilling etc.)
David Sandilands, (Computer Unit),
From: Tim Rylance <mcvax!praxis!t...@seismo.CSS.GOV>
Subject: Re: war stories wanted
I've had a LaserWriter for 2 years and a Dataproducts 2665 for 2 months.
Both have printed 50000-60000 pages so far. Some random opinions:
* the 2665 holds 2000 sheets of paper if you buy the sheet feeder.
The LW holds 100 sheets. This makes a big difference for me.
* the 2665 is write-white, the LW is write-black. The print quality
on the LW is much better. The 2665 tends to produce closely spaced
parallel grey lines at right angles to the direction of paper
motion unless you clean it very carefully or something - I've seen
the same problem on most 2665s which are actually being used as
opposed to shown at exhibitions.
* for single font stuff the 2665 really does get pretty near its rated
speed, exceeding 20 pages/minute of lineprinter listing type output
for hundreds of pages at a time. Multiple font stuff is fairly fast
once the right fonts are in the cache (no figures I'm afraid, but if
you print a large complex document twice in succession the second
comes out quite a bit faster). I'm running at 9600 baud at the
moment and TeX dvi files are pretty excruciating - the first page
takes about a minute. I'm pretty sure this is a line-speed problem
because printing the same dvi2ps-ed file on a LW from a Mac over
Appletalk is much quicker. The 2665 goes up to 57600 baud (as do
current LWs) - I really must get round to changing it!
Once large dvi files get going, they chug along at 6 pages/minute or so.
* maintenance costs for the 2665 here in the UK are quite high - of the
order of 1c per page. It's still cheaper to run than the LW, though.
* we get 4500-5000 copies from LW toner cartridges.
Summarising, I couldn't manage without the paper capacity of the 2665 for
lineprinter-type work but the quality of LW output is much better.
When I next buy printers in 6 months time or so I'll look very critically
at the Agfa P400PS and buy one of them or a bunch of LWs. Unless something
better comes out in the meantime, of course.
Hope this is of some use - I'll be interested to hear of your findings.
Regards,
Tim Rylance ...!seismo!mcvax!ukc!praxis!tkr
pat...@unirot.uucp.uucp
68020 PostScript hardware. The only fonts available for it are the ones
announced by Adobe (and other third party font vendors) for PostScript
printers. Compugraphic's fonts WILL NOT WORK ON IT. PostScript printers
only understand fonts written in PostScript, so the AGFA cannot take
advantage of Compugraphic's font library. The same hold true for a
Linotronic 100/300 running PostScript: they cannot use the Merg fonts
in PostScript (doesn't mean you can't use the L100/300 as a traditional
compositor with the Merg fonts, just means you can't access them in PS).
Pat Wood
Editor, The PostScript Language Journal