laser-lovers@uw-beaver (08/14/85)
From: Richard Furuta <Furuta@WASHINGTON.arpa>
The following press release (and additional note) came in to me
directly from a person at Imagen. The information seems to me to be
of general interest and so I'm forwarding it to the list as a whole.
I hope that the list will overlook the marketing-oriented tone of the
note---normally I'd reword the information but I don't have the time
just right now to do that.
--Rick
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT:
Resa Quinn (Imagen Corp.) (408) 986-9400
Dan Post (Franson and Associates Inc.) (408) 946-1400
Imagen's New ImageStation(tm) Family of Non-impact Page Printers
Bring Typeset Quality Printing and Business Graphics to the Workstation Market
SANTA CLARA, Calif., August 12, 1985 Imagen Corp., a manufacturer of
intelligent, nonimpact page printing systems, today introduced the
ImageStation Series of text and graphic laser printers for the
workstation market.
The ImageStation Series consists of three models: the
Executive, priced at $5,950; the Designer, priced at $6,400; and the
Innovator, priced at $7,200. All three models use the popular Canon
CX printing mechanism and print eight pages per minute on up to
14-inch cut sheet paper. The Executive is intended for text and
business graphics, the Designer for increased graphics support and the
Innovator for the most demanding graphics, including the printing
needs of very sophisticated computer-aided design (CAD) and
computer-aided engineering (CAE) applications.
"The ImageStation Series represents a new level of
price/performance," said Bill Boehm, Product Manager for the
ImageStation Series. "Imagen performance is now available to the
workstation user at a reasonable price. No longer will users have to
compromise their ideas to fit their printing capabilities -- the
ImageStation Series fits quickly into a variety of environments, and
doesn't penalize imaginative users with creeping performance."
As members of the Imagen printstation product line, all of the
ImageStation Series feature unique document-handling capabilities,
such as page reversal, collation of multiple copies and jam recovery.
They also feature proprietary Real-time Rasterization(tm) technology,
a process developed by Imagen that increases printing speed by
allowing concurrent page processing and printing.
To meet the printing needs of existing applications including
simple letter printing, emulators of popular printers are built into
each ImageStation, allowing quick "plug and play" installation. All
ImageStation models include emulators for the following printers:
Epson FX-80, Diablo 630 ECS, Qume Sprint 11, IBM 5152 and Tektronix
4014. In each case, extra effort has been made to provide complete
emulation, not just a minimal subset. Imagen's popular page
description language imPRESS(tm) is fully supported, allowing
effortless merging of text, graphics and bit-maps on a single page.
Each printer includes Courier 8-, 10-, 12- and 14-point
typefaces, with 10- and 12-point bold, in all orientations --
portrait, landscape and inverted. Optional fonts may be host-resident
-- or printer-resident, which eliminates down-loading time. The
entire Imagen library of typefaces is available for these
page-printing systems, including Lucida(rg) the first font designed
specifically for laser printers -- as well as Times Roman(rg) and
Helvetica(rg).
All ImageStations have a resolution of 90,000 dots per square
inch (300 by 300) and use dry toner and plain paper. They support
many host computers running the UNIX(tm) operating system, including
those manufactured by Digital Equipment Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc.
and Apollo Computer Inc. They also support a variety of document
composition systems such as troff, TeX(tm) and Scribe(tm).
All three ImageStations may be ordered now, with immediate
delivery. Imagen offers its full product line to end-users through
company representatives.
Imagen also manufactures custom configurations for OEM
customers. The ImageStation image processor is available separately
to OEMs that wish to configure it with various printing engines and
computer systems.
Imagen Corp., founded in 1980, develops, manufactures and
markets intelligent, non-impact page printing systems for OEMs and end
users. The company markets a family of products that mix text of
multiple type styles and print sizes with graphic images to provide
high-quality printing for a wide variety of applications. Imagen
printstations offer cost/performance advantages, and support host
computers running UNIX, as well as other operating systems.
Imagen is headquartered at 2650 San Tomas Expressway, Santa
Clara, California, 95052. Telephone (408) 986-9400.
--30--
UNIX is a trademark of AT&T Bell Laboratories.
Helvetica and Times Roman are registered trademarks of Allied Corp.
Imagen, imPRESS, ImageStation and Real-time Rasterization are trademarks
of Imagen Corp.
Tektronix is a trademark of Tektronix Inc.
Scribe is a trademark of Unilogic Ltd.
Lucida is a trademark of Bigelow & Holmes, Inc.
TeX is a trademark of the American Mathematical Society.
P.S. The ImageStation is a 68000, ROM-based system. While the
ImageServer series (8/300, 12/300, and 24/300) boot their code from
disk, the ImageStation RAM memory is all available for jobs. This
allows the minimum configuration, the Executive, to run with only 256K
bytes of RAM. The Designer, with 512K bytes of RAM, can print pages
slightly more complex than the current 2.1 system software version
ImageServer with 768K of memory (our most widely sold configuration)
in Pre-rasterization mode. That's a lengthy way of saying that the
Designer will satisfy most user's needs. The Innovator, with 1.5 M
bytes of memory, is a "print anything" machine.
All of the ImageStations use the Canon LBP-CX engine. The
system software is compatible with the ImageServer, and is in fact a
superset: more emulators and emulator mixing (multiple emulators per
job or per page) are supported by the ImageStation. Datacomm
interfaces are RS-423 (RS-232 compatible) and Centronics parallel.
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