reid@Glacier@uw-beaver (reid@Glacier) (11/29/83)
From: Brian Reid <reid@Glacier> ReSent-date: Tue 29 Nov 83 12:35:55-PST ReSent-from: Richard Furuta <Furuta@WASHINGTON.ARPA> ReSent-to: "Laser Lovers": ; Mike Harrison mentioned "reports of a new 400 dot/inch Agfa printer". I have been waiting to see if any of the xerography engineers and laser printer hardware experts whom I know to be on Laser-lechers would answer. None of them did; let me see if I can fill in some details. I saw the Agfa P400 raster printer demonstrated in Europe this spring. It was clearly limited by the speed of the minicomputer driving it, as its page rate was quite dependent on the number of characters per page. I would estimate that it could run 20 pages a minute "wide open". I was told at the time that it accomplished its raster imaging with a forest of LED's and some fiber-optic magic that brought the images of all of the LED's into a straight line. Other than this slick trick for the raster scanning, it looked like a pretty traditional dry-process xerographic marking engine. The print quality was fantastic. I was quoted a price of D.M. 120 000, which comes to somewhere between $30K and $60K depending on the exchange rate for the D-Mark. The representative told me that Agfa was not at all interested in selling them in the U.S. I believe that I more recently heard Andreas Bechtolsheim, the German designer of the Sun workstation, expressing frustration that he was unable to buy such fine German technology to use as a printer for his workstation. Brian Reid Stanford