henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (10/12/84)
We've just had an HP LaserJet printer on loan from HP Canada for a few
days. This is HP's little laser printer, educational (FST exempt) cost
about $3600 Canadian. We like it. It is basically a replacement for
a daisywheel printer, not a typesetter simulator, but even so it's nice.
It does not have the memory capacity for fancy things like downloadable
fonts, and its on-board fonts are limited, hence no "real typesetting".
But as an ordinary printer it's good. Fast -- 8 pages/minute. Quiet --
just a cooling fan and a bit of mechanical clunking from the paper feed.
Truly excellent print quality. It will print on ordinary paper, letterhead,
etc. It will print on things like envelopes as well, although you have to
hand-feed them. And the price is right. Delivery is *claimed* to be
3-4 weeks.
The thing has one wart: it wants to be talked to at 9600 baud with 8-bit
data and no parity, and there is *no* choice about any of this. Getting
8-bit data plus XON/XOFF flow control (which it needs) out of a V7 Unix
is quite a trick. We had to kludge our kernel a bit to accomplish this.
We've let HP know what we think of this design botch. Other than this,
we've had no problem driving it. Recommended.
--
Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry