ken@CS.ROCHESTER.EDU.UUCP (03/30/87)
Well, time to keep my promise to summarize responses to my request for info. I have lightly edited the responses. I think I will not make any editorial comments but let the replies speak for themselves. Thanks to all who contributed. Oh, we have decided to get a couple of Laserwriter+ printers to tide us over and to keep an eye on future developments. Ken From: jshelton@zodiac.ads.ARPA (John L. Shelton) Subject: Info on printers I am undergoing the same search process. Perhaps I can share some info with you. [start of excerpt] Postscript ----------- ... Here is the entire list of manufacturers selling postscript printers: Agfa-Gevaert, Apollo, Apple, Dataproducts, Diconix, Digital Equipment, ITT Qume, NBI, NEC, QMS, Sun, Texas Instruments, Linotype. Included in this list are low-res printers, and two photo-typesetters at 1200 dpi and 2400 dpi!!! The reasonable candidates are listed in detail below. Agfa-Gevaert 18ppm 30,000 18ppm50 This printer is 400 dots per inch; nearly twice the resolution of the other printers. We might be able to afford two of them. It is sold and serviced by CompuGraphics, one of the largest manufacturers of computerized typesetting equipment. Apple LW 8ppm 3,500 112ppm50 AT this price we could buy 14 of them; put one in every suite. We'd almost need to; they have to be baby-sat for all but the smallest jobs. Cost of operation is high; like the Imagen 8/300, this is based on the canon engine that self-destructs in 100,000 pages. (I've seen this happen, folks.) Apple LW+ 8ppm 5,000 80ppm50 Just like the LW, but more built-in fonts, and more memory. Reputed to be a bit faster in processing data. We might consider a mix of these printers. Dataproducts LZR 2665 26ppm 17,000 78ppm50 We sampled print quality at Ampex; it wasn't great. If you grade print quality in the following ranges: 10 Phototypeset 8 Excellent laser printer (we haven't seen yet) 6 Good laser printer (Apple sometimes, Imagen sometimes) 4 poor laser printer, good dot-matrix 2 line printer class Then the Dataproducts would be a 5 or so. We'll be getting more print samples soon. Best feature is fast speed with high paper volume; big input trays, output trays. Easy paper path, low maintenance. Could be easy to scratch the drum, since it is exposed when you try to clear a jam. Has appletalk interface, plus serial, parallel. ITT Qume ScriptTEN 10ppm 10,000 50ppm50 about a 6 on my quality scale. I have some print samples. Low volume printer not really worth a lot of consideration. QMS PS 2400 24ppm ??,??? (about 35K) 24ppm50 Based on the Xerox XP-24 engine. Not yet released; they are about a year behind on this printer. Probably too expensive. TI Omnilaser 2115 15ppm 8,000 90ppm50 Based on a Ricoh engine. I've heard characters appear light. TI is undergoing a revision of the printer; Ricoh is in Austin Texas working with TI to straiten out problems. If it works and looks good, I'd say it is a strong candidate. Has multiple input trays, stacks output in staggered fashion, will do face up or face down, medium paper volume. Has appletalk interface, plus serial, parallel. There is also an 8ppm version. Diconix (Kodak) Dijit 1/PS 20ppm 16,000 60ppm50 Ink-jet, not laser. Lower cost of operation. DUPLEX printer; prints on both sides. Reduced paper costs. Have sample output coming. Not available until May. Sounds interesting. Designed to be a high-volume printer (up to 70,000 pages per month. For reference, we are doing about 30K now; I expect us to increase to 60K per month once we buy new printers.) Prints nicely on cotton bond paper, unlike most laser printers. [end of excerpt] Since this review, I went to see the Dataproducts printer again, and fed it myself using a Macintosh. ... The Dataproducts could crank out up to at least 20 ppm, but only on the simplest of pages. If you use it in line-pritner mode, it goes just fine. Trying to send some Mac Word documents slowed it down substantially, to about 10 ppm, even with one font per page. The output quality just isn't that good. Characters are not consistent on the page; a "g" might be splotched differently depending where it lies, for example. Also, the unit I saw had very light output; the black just wasn't very black. This has nothing to do with the thickness of lines. The printouts looked like not-very-good xerographic copies overall. I can't really recommend this printer for quality work. One vendor I spoke with (Agfa, via Compugraphic) says that all the other vendors are using the slower Postscript hardware from Adobe, and that they have this faster board. This could explain the slowness of many of the printers. I eagerly await seeing the TI printer, because of the good ratio of cost versus speed. Since the electronics may be the limiting factor, it makes more sense to have twice as many pritners with 1/2 the top speed, especially if they all print about the same speed when the page complexity forces the issue. The Agfa SOUNDS nice. They will be sending me sample output. Features that appeal: lots of fonts (who has more than Compugraphic?), high resolution, 4 year old technology for the print engine (So they probably have the bugs out of it. Problem is cost; I could only afford 1 or 2. IF their high-speed controller makes a difference, this could be the fastest printer around. I assume you've looked at DEC's printserver 40. I saw one at DECUS a few months ago. It was pretty fast, but you need VMS to drive it. It is built around a microvax which must be downloaded over ethernet from a VAX. =John Shelton= From: "Nelson H.F. Beebe" <Beebe@UTAH-SCIENCE.ARPA> Subject: Canon LBP-CX cartridge lifetime I cannot comment on the QMS and Dataproducts PostScript printers. We have had an Imagen 8/300 for 4 yr and an Apple LaserWriter for 1.5 yr, and I have an HPLJ+ at home on my PC; all these use the Canon LBP-CX engine. We seem to average between 3000 and 4000 copies per cartridge, but we also do a lot of graphics which uses less toner. I can't imagine stretching this to 8000, unless perhaps they were doing nothing but graphics. When the toner goes, it goes fast--you can shake the cartridge, but you probably cannot get more than a dozen more pages out of it before large white streaks appear on your output; I guess that is good design from Canon (remember how line printer ribbons produce black output the first day, and grey output for weeks after). One thing to consider is the nature of the printing engine with respect to TeX fonts. A non-Canon engine is going to force you to regenerate fonts with different parameters. We have a Ricoh-based PCP 2000 (same engine DEC LN03 uses). Canon fonts output on it are readable, but so thin that narrow parts actually are broken; the output is certainly readable, but would be unacceptable for document reproduction. We also have an Imagen 3320 (20ppm large Canon engine); output on it is certainly not as black as with the LBP-CX engine, but is acceptable if we turn up the intensity dial. ------- From: tahoe!pjg@seismo.CSS.GOV (Paul Graham) Subject: qms800 I've used the LW and the qms. The qms was much lighter than the LW (I've no idea why) so we used it with the darkness all the way up. I couldn't change the page offset parameters in the qms (of course they said they were about to change the firmware in the thing) and subjectively it seems much slower on starup but quicker from page to page. Despite having more memory I ran out of memory on a job that printed on the LW. I guess all this means I'd buy another LW but not another QMS-800. -- Paul Graham From: mcvax!cwi.nl!jaap@seismo.CSS.GOV Subject: Re: war stories wanted No Postscript printer can push out text at the rated speed. It only can do this if it doesn't need to recalculate the page. There is no bottleneck in the 9600 baud line, since the time it takes to calulate the pages. The QMS is slightly faster then the LaserWriter, but not a lot. PostScript is the real bottleneck. The 2660 is much faster then the laserwriter when is does simple things like enscript or dumb lpr output. No, it depend on the amount a output you crank trough the macghine. When the machine is heavely loaded, 8000 to 10000 pagers is possible. You need sometimes to shake the cassette a bit to get a more uniform black on the page. The Agfa P400 is an impossible machine. The original version had a stupid user interface, which made it unusable for anything more sophisticated then a lineprinter. The PostScript version was supposed to be announced here the 1st of januari this year, but even the factory in Belgium, were they are made doesn't know when it will become available, when I called them a month ago. Looks like vaporware to me. We have two LaserWiters for the central printing facilities. They are connected to the portselsctor, so the various machines (mostly vaxes) can just "call it up" and the MICOM will choose the available one. Weekly are about 3000 to 10000 pages printed. I don't know how long these machines will survive this set up (They are official rated at 3000 pages a month). After a while (say 20000) pages the printers are really "burned in". The mechanics start to makie interesting sqeeking noices, but it keeps working. The Dataproduct was just brought in last friday to replace this set-up. The main features is that it is rated at this amount of output, so it probably won't start to make the noices as the LaserWriters. The main improvement is that it will take 1500 to 2000 pages in the input bin. Now you don't have to insert new paper every half hour to the machine, and maybe it is enought to survive the night, without the need to sit around in the morning filling the LaserWriters with paper while the machines are flushing there queues which was waiting on the Out of Paper situation. I have played with a with an QMS P800 on an other site. It seams a little bit faster then the LaserWriter, but not really significant. jaap From: ucsbcsl!grosen@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU Subject: PostScript,xtp,xdvi Ken: ... We have Apple and so far have been pretty happy with it. The first one came DOA, but since then (2 years ago) we have not had any problems. I have not kept track of how many pages we get from a cartridge. As far as bitmaps go, I have tried to get the GREMLIN extensions going with the Transcript software from Adobe. The only hard part has been setting up the bitmaps for area fills to go with the filled polygons. This procedure seems to be incredibly slow and laborious. Just using a gray scale is easy and fast, but to get the actual bitmap pattern is SLOOOWWW! I tried to get the CIFPLOT patterns to work (these are the patterns used with UCB CAD routines for VLSI), and found that a page printout took many minutes. I do not claim to be a PostScript expert. I just used the sample program in the Cookbook for doing bitmaps/area fills. Mark Grosen From: Jean-Francois Lamy <utai!lamy@seismo.CSS.GOV> Subject: Re: war stories wanted A LaserWriter + handles 19200 bauds. I have never seen TeX output come out faster that 4 pages a minute, 2 being more typical (if there are lots of font changes). Single font text from troff and TeX fares about 4 ppm Jean-Francois Lamy lamy@ai.toronto.edu (CSNet, UUCP) From: seismo!mnetor!utzoo!henry Subject: Re: war stories wanted > What is your average yield from a Canon LBP-CX (Laserwriter) > cartridge? 3000-4000 is suggested as good, but someone quoted 8000. Is > that unrealistic? Yes. Over a couple of years of fairly heavy operation, we consistently get just about 5000 pages per cartridge. It's seldom under 4500 or over 5500. We've had it pass 6000 just once. 8000 sounds like a fantasy to me, unless the average density on the page is awfully low. Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology From: "Col. G. L. Sicherman" <colonel%buffalo.csnet@RELAY.CS.NET> Subject: printers We have a QMS 1200, and it's as good as it's cracked up to be. I can't say anything about the 800. :L From: Glenn Trewitt <trewitt@amadeus.stanford.edu> Subject: Re: war stories wanted At the end of this message is one from William LeFabre at Rice University about LaserWriter durability. [LeFebvre's message has appeared in a previous note to laser-lovers - Ken] I pretty much agree with his comments. We drove our two LaserWriters into the ground and eventually had to get the fuser rollers replaced. Other than that, we have been very happy. I would strongly suggest that you get the LW+, since it has more fonts and is has many performance improvements over the original LW. It can handle serial communications much more flexiby and up to 56Kbaud, rather than just 9600. It interleaves computation and printing. And general improvements to overall speed are made. IF the QMS PS800 is based on the Xerox print engine (square box about 2 feet on a side) DON'T buy it. I haven't talked to anybody who hasn't had a lot of maintenance problems with it (including us). - Glenn Trewitt From: seismo!mnetor!yetti!mike (Mike Clarkson ) Subject: Re: war stories wanted Check out the Texas Instruments 2115. We're thinking of ordering one. 3Meg Ram, Cartidges, 2 bins, 2nd generation ricoh engine with a very heavy duty cycle. They will even burn TeX cm fonts onto cartridges forabout 400$. Mike Clarkson. From: William Roberts <liam%cs.qmc.ac.uk@Cs.Ucl.AC.UK> Subject: Re: war stories wanted We have 4 LaserWriter+ which we run from various UNIX machines via 9600 baud terminal lines. Cartridges: We get between 5000 and 5500 pages per cartridge regardless of print mix (so it seems). Shaking the cartridge can add a couple of hundred copies but as we eat a cartridge in 2 weeks (on each printer) I get fed up of shaking things just for an extra couple of hours printing. We run them until you get large white areas where print out to go - I don't believe 8000 pages. You can see a degradation after about 4000 copies; the print just goes a bit fainter. Print Speed: We can get 8ppm out of our beast, but only for very special jobs: for example, we have an annual mass mailshot to prospective students, and my handcrafted PostScript tacked onto ditroff output just does a Reader's Digest job on the name, address and a few other fields. By using "copypage" to retain the rest of the image, this does print at full speed. Otherwise we get more like 4ppm on normal jobs (including ditroff). There is a hiccup whilst new fonts get cached, e.g. moving from Diablo-like Courier font to Ditroff Times-Roman, but this isn't noticably a drawback. Line Rate: 9600 baud is the bottleneck unless you write PostScript programs that compute fractal mountains directly! It takes me about 10 minutes to print a 512x512x8 bit TV picture and that is almost all transmission time (NB. 8 bits converted to ASCII hex = 16 bits). If you can use AppleTalk then do so - MacPaint prints bitmaps a damn sight faster than I can from our VAX. William Roberts ARPA: liam@cs.qmc.ac.uk (gw: cs.ucl.edu) From: David Sandilands <munnari!RSBS0.anu.oz!SANDILANDS@seismo.CSS.GOV> Subject: Laser Printers. Ken, We have 5 LaserWriters and a DEC LN03 . For word processing the LN03 is reasonable, especially with a program such as WPS. However the number of 'fonts' is limited, and its capabilities in areas such as italics are poor. It is Ricoh based and supposed to require maintenance less often than the Canon engines. There is no way to extend the number of copies from the available toner. You cannot reliably feed them with 'bank' paper (very light weight). They tend to chew the corners off and put them in funny places around the film. The LaserWriters are all working well (4 LW+, 1 soon to be +). We have obtained up to 9200 copies from a toner cartridge, with 7500 about the norm. We have obtained quite a lot of useful information from this news group, about LWs, which you may be able to get from the archives, if you go this way (articles on maintenance, cartridge refilling etc.) David Sandilands, (Computer Unit), From: Tim Rylance <mcvax!praxis!tkr@seismo.CSS.GOV> Subject: Re: war stories wanted I've had a LaserWriter for 2 years and a Dataproducts 2665 for 2 months. Both have printed 50000-60000 pages so far. Some random opinions: * the 2665 holds 2000 sheets of paper if you buy the sheet feeder. The LW holds 100 sheets. This makes a big difference for me. * the 2665 is write-white, the LW is write-black. The print quality on the LW is much better. The 2665 tends to produce closely spaced parallel grey lines at right angles to the direction of paper motion unless you clean it very carefully or something - I've seen the same problem on most 2665s which are actually being used as opposed to shown at exhibitions. * for single font stuff the 2665 really does get pretty near its rated speed, exceeding 20 pages/minute of lineprinter listing type output for hundreds of pages at a time. Multiple font stuff is fairly fast once the right fonts are in the cache (no figures I'm afraid, but if you print a large complex document twice in succession the second comes out quite a bit faster). I'm running at 9600 baud at the moment and TeX dvi files are pretty excruciating - the first page takes about a minute. I'm pretty sure this is a line-speed problem because printing the same dvi2ps-ed file on a LW from a Mac over Appletalk is much quicker. The 2665 goes up to 57600 baud (as do current LWs) - I really must get round to changing it! Once large dvi files get going, they chug along at 6 pages/minute or so. * maintenance costs for the 2665 here in the UK are quite high - of the order of 1c per page. It's still cheaper to run than the LW, though. * we get 4500-5000 copies from LW toner cartridges. Summarising, I couldn't manage without the paper capacity of the 2665 for lineprinter-type work but the quality of LW output is much better. When I next buy printers in 6 months time or so I'll look very critically at the Agfa P400PS and buy one of them or a bunch of LWs. Unless something better comes out in the meantime, of course. Hope this is of some use - I'll be interested to hear of your findings. Regards, Tim Rylance ...!seismo!mcvax!ukc!praxis!tkr
patwood@unirot.UUCP.UUCP (03/31/87)
The Agfa 400PS printer is the only announced product that supports the 68020 PostScript hardware. The only fonts available for it are the ones announced by Adobe (and other third party font vendors) for PostScript printers. Compugraphic's fonts WILL NOT WORK ON IT. PostScript printers only understand fonts written in PostScript, so the AGFA cannot take advantage of Compugraphic's font library. The same hold true for a Linotronic 100/300 running PostScript: they cannot use the Merg fonts in PostScript (doesn't mean you can't use the L100/300 as a traditional compositor with the Merg fonts, just means you can't access them in PS). Pat Wood Editor, The PostScript Language Journal