laser-lovers@uw-beaver (laser-lovers) (09/18/84)
From: <hplabs!bragvax!david@Berkeley> I had a nice long talk this morning with Mike Cohn (I think I spelled that right) from Imagen. I was surprised and pleased by this response; "laser-lovers" seems pretty dead from the Usenet side, and I didn't expect anyone at Imagen to care about what was said (posted) here. Anyway, Mike promised me a beta-site copy of V2.1 firmware and some solid information on multiple font use with standard troff (i.e. chartab.txt). On a different topic, a couple of people have mentioned the problem in determining when the toner cartridge is going to run out. The color-coded gadget on the side is just too crude to be useful. I can understand why the host software (Un*x version anyway) doesn't count pages (too expensive (computationally)), and I can understand why Canon didn't put a mechanical counter in the print engine (too expensive (in yen)), but I can't understand why the Imagen firmware doesn't count pages printed and send the count back to the host. Then impacct would be worth something and I would have a good idea when the toner was about to run out. As for the cartridge shaking trick, I gave up on that almost immediately. It only gained a couple of hundred pages, and it's easy to shake the toner right out of the cartridge onto the floor. P.S. Ironically, the local Talaris rep. called right after Mike Cohn. He was following up on Siggraph -- fast response. (Does anyone out there have a Talaris?) P.P.S. Even more ironically, our print engine died today. However, I don't have any complaints (yet) about Imagen's field service. David DiGiacomo, BRAG Systems Inc., San Mateo CA (415) 342-3963 (...decvax!ucbvax!hplabs!bragvax!david)