laser-lovers@uw-beaver (laser-lovers) (09/21/84)
From: mark@gymble (Mark Weiser) Thought people would be interested in our 8/300 experience. I think we got one of the earliest shipments, delivered in May. Imagen had a little trouble getting our software straight (it initally came with only 240dpi fonts, for instance), but by June things were pretty reasonable. And then the users hit. They love it. Usage on our 10/240 (also from Imagen) had been about 5000 pages a month. This shot up to 10,000 the first month on the 8/300, and has dropped back to around 8,000 pages a month now, I think. (Sure wish those little cartridges were easier to get--our local rep doesn't stock any, they have to be shipped from California, and a little miscalculation can really brings things to a halt for a while). The print is always very dark with none of the drop out that the 10/240 has, and not needing the constant adjustment of drum that the 10/240 needs. You get a new drum with every cartridge on the 8/300. Imagen says the cartridges are good for 3000 pages, or only 2000 to maintain best image quality. We get 4000 in normal use, and 5000 by removing the cartridge, shaking it, and putting it back (those shipments from California, remember?) The cartridges seem to fail suddenly, with big white streaks down the page, with no preceeding gradual decrease in quality. The printer doesn't seem to detect that the cartridge is bad, but I am not sure if it is supposed to. It is supposed to be a low volume device, and our use is probably well beyond the design specs. So far it has held up great-- no mechanical problems whatsoever. Not even a paper jam. The blank paper stacker is way too small. We ordered the ethernet interface for our imagen, but we didn't have a transceiver until recently. (Darn the FCC--noone is shipping tranceivers with their ethernet boards anymore.) When we finally got around to trying it over the ethernet (we had been talking rs-232 before that) Imagen again had shipped us the wrong software. A call to California, a Federal Express tape, a 'make all', and a vampire tap, and we were talking over the ethernet. Our vaxes appreciated not having to send their troff output through a central server. Glitches: Our initial diskette from Imagen was quite buggy. Lots of ordinary user troff output would hang the printer controller, requiring power cycling. The new diskettes we got with our replacement ethernet software seem to have fixed that. If anyone else out there is having problems with their 8/300 hanging, and you got an early shipment, try getting a new diskette. Some of the fonts are terrible. 12 point roman lowercase i has its dot on top of, and slightly to the left of, the top of the stem. 10 point is fine. Very large sizes (like 18 point and above) greek show strange artifacts (like the 22 point alpha, which looks like it was drawn by two fine point pens held a quarter-inch apart). Some of the width tables seem to mismatch the true character widths, I think, because the output seems to be funnily spaced at 12 point now and again (try "f(x)" at 12 point). The rated output is 8 pages per minute. It seems to often run slower than that, waiting between pages for something (we have a 1M machine, so there should be lots of room to pre-process pages). This was before the diskette upgrade for ethernet, so that may be fixed now. Before the 8/300 was shipped there were some rumors that fonts would only be accessible via rom, and extra fonts would cost extra bucks. Not true. Imagen sent us over 200 fonts with our initial tape, no extra charge. Summary: nice machine, great price, reliable, we'll be ordering more.