shapiro@inria.UUCP (Marc Shapiro) (09/24/86)
From: furuta@MIMSY.UMD.EDU (Richard Furuta)
Computerworld, September 8, page 10, in an article covering the Seybold
Desktop Publishing Seminars, mentions a new PostScript printer [called
the P400-PS].
Agfa-Gaevert announced a 400dpi, 16 ppm ("although it slows with heavily
graphic pages"), $28k printer to be available in January, but they haven't
lined up a US distributor.
- The printer uses "LED array electro-photographic marking
technology."
I have worked for a long time with the previous version of this, the P400.
A nice beast, very crisp printing, 406 dpi, font sizes down to 6 points
quite readable (100 lines on an A4 page is nice when listing a large
program). Fonts are in ROM, you can buy as many as you need with the
machine. The technology is quite good; the marking engine rarely fails.
The LED technology is a big win over standard laser beam + moving mirrors.
There is a 2000 page paper bin, an alternate bin for header pages or special
paper, *and* a paper flipper so that the pages come out in the right order
without the need for software to print things backwards (neat).
I was never able to test their claim that it prints 18 pages/minute because
the only interface was a 9600 bd line and if you count the time it takes to
send all the characters to fill the 100 lines of a page plus font changes,
etc., you need more than 1/18th of a minute to fill a page. Nevertheless,
at full blast 9600 baud the printer never slowed down; it hardly ever sent a
^S to the computer.
The BIG problem with the non-PS P400 is its terrible command language. You
can do anything with horizontal or vertical ASCII text (but you can only do
vertical text if you have "vertical" font ROMS !!!) but no graphics. You
can draw any kind of horizontal or vertical line, mask portions of the page,
etc. but you can't even draw a diagonal line!
I saw a demo of the new P400-PS at the Paris SICOB. It works. Cost is
about 180 000 Francs == $26 000, i.e. cheaper than the non-PS version. They
will NOT upgrade a non-PS to the PS version because the machine is totally
different inside; apparently Adobe didn't even keep their power supply. The
demo was not very convincing because they only had 300dpi fonts to print. I
have no idea of the actual printing speed. The new model has an RS-232, an
RS-422, an AppleTalk and a Centronics interface. No Ethernet interface
contemplated.
I suppose you can trust Adobe did a good job. If so the P400PS will be a
BIG winner. For 3.6 times the price of a Laserwriter (in France, anyway)
you get much more than 3.6 times the printing speed, durability, print
quality, etc.
P.S. Oh yes there is an other bug with the old P400, which they might have
fixed by now: you'd get very dirty filling the toner tank.