laser-lovers@uw-beaver.UUCP (02/01/84)
From cak@Purdue.ARPA Tue Jan 31 14:30:42 1984 Does anyone have experience with this beast? An IBM salesman recently contacted us about it, claiming - can be loaded with up to 2700 sheets of paper - all point addressable - graphics, fonts, etc. - down loaded fonts - rotation mode - portrait or landscape - is both a copier and a printer - can print on both sides of paper - loads of other features. Cost of basic unit (hmm, does the basic unit do all those things?) would be about $31k to us (don't know how that relates to the rest of the world). It uses EBCDIC, but the salesman claims knowledge of code converters from ASCII. They are even willing to demo it from their Chicago office over a phone line! So, I would like to hear of good/bad expriences, if someone knows what marking engine is used, etc. I have heard from one person already that the paper path is quite baroque and that the IBM repair people spend a lot of time fixing paper jams; anything else? Cheers, chris ----------
laser-lovers@uw-beaver.UUCP (02/01/84)
From cak@Purdue.ARPA Tue Jan 31 16:43:20 1984 ReSent-date: Tue 31 Jan 84 16:40:28-PST ReSent-from: Richard Furuta <Furuta@WASHINGTON.ARPA> ReSent-to: "Laser Lovers": ; Ooops... my little joke (6670p?) seems to have flown right over many people's head. Too much lisp hacking lately, maybe -- I added the p merely as an extra interrogative. I am inquiring about the IBM 6670 laser printer, not some new variation on it. Sorry for the confusion, chris ----------
laser-lovers@uw-beaver (laser-lovers) (02/03/84)
From yduJ.HP-LABS@Rand-Relay Thu Feb 2 19:37:22 1984 You *don't* want a 6670 unless you've got an IBM computer to drive it. We've got one being run by a DEC-20 with an ascii-to-ebcdic translator in between that also does asynch to bisynch protocol translation. (This is a micro that's provided by "Black Box", a company in Boston I think.) It drops characters all the time, and you can't tell. If it jams it just sits there happily waiting for you to clear the jam, and doesn't tell you. It jams regularly when printing to both sides of the paper. Indeed, the paper path is rather baroque... If someone decides to use it as a copier while you're printing, they get priority. If they forget to push the button that says "I'm done copying now" well tough luck. It doesn't tell you that it needs someone to push the button. Loadable fonts? Yeah, they gave us some song and dance about that too... Don't believe it. All points addressable? Not in my documentation or experience! Even if you get more fonts, be aware that you may only use 4 fonts per page and 6 fonts per document. Italics and bold face are, of course, different fonts... And the normal fonts don't include all the ascii characters, in order to get some wierdies like "}" and "|" you have to use the "special symbols font", which of course uses up another font slot in your document or page. Doesn't seem to be accent grave (`) at all -- my driver translates ` into ' so as not to print an ugly black blotch on the page (it does this if you give it a character code that doesn't exist in the currently selected font). The font "Essay" is their standard variable pitch font. It's not bad looking, and comes with associated bold and italic fonts. The way to position things within a line (what? You wanted to put something halfway between lines?) is to put "unit spaces" between characters. A "unit space" is one fifth of a space. Each character in the font is a multiple of one fifth spaces wide. Justified documents look quite nice, but you can't use it to print TeX output. (Getting it to accept something as a unit space is something else altogether! We managed to get control T (octal 24) as our unit space character. Of course, we are fighting this Black Box translator thing as well. Sometimes I think that was a mistake and we should have just done the gruntwork of the bisynch protocol in the driver on the 20 instead of trying to save ourselves work.) Their special symbols font seems to be a mishmash of math symbols and line drawing symbols. We've found the need for some that weren't there and have wondered why they included some of them. It is true that you can make nice boxed-in diagrams with the line drawing characters. Unfortunately you have to change the inter-line spacing to make the lines be connected and you're not allowed have more than one interline spacing on a page. (Otherwise you might change them within a page to get more accurate placement of characters, I guess!) You change things in the middle of the document by giving "OCL commands", which have a comma as the first character in a line. (You guessed it. If you want a comma at the beginning of a line in your document you gotta put a space in front of it.) OCL stands for Operator's Command Language. It's pretty ugly, and hard to make it do what you want. It has only one font in the landscape mode. This is an anomaly -- it has all the ascii characters and is quite useful for "lineprinter simulation" to get listings of finished programs to be put in binders or whatever. Seems to be the only good thing about the machine! They'll tell you that it runs at 4800 baud; in practice we get about 1200 out of it. About the only good features are that it holds lots and lots of paper and can print on both sides when it's in the mood. Get a Xerox 2700... Better yet, get a Canon... Judy Anderson HP-Labs yduJ.hp-labs@csnet-relay -------
laser-lovers@uw-beaver (laser-lovers) (02/04/84)
From ima!haddock!johnl@CCA-UNIX Fri Feb 3 14:31:47 1984 Our Los Angeles office has a 6670. I'm certainly underwhelmed. The interface is extremely baroque, being bisync sort of compatible with mag card selectric data streams passed as though to a 2770 RJE station. Unless they've changed the microcode a lot, they're not bit addressable; you get a limited (but attractive) set of fonts. You can have your letterhead and signature digitized for a price. There are strange resrtictions on the number of fonts usable on a single page. You can indeed use it as a copier, and even interrupt print jobs to make a few copies and let it pick up. The interface is limited to 4800 or 9600 baud, much slower than the printer can go, so while you're copying it's spooling onto an internal floppy disk, and when you're done it quickly catches up. The main complaint is that they seem to be built for about a 10% duty cycle. If you run them 6 or 8 hours a day, they break constantly. Here in Boston, we got an Imagen. John Levine, ima!johnl, Levine@YALE.ARPA