ron%tp4@RAND-UNIX.ARPA.UUCP (08/02/86)
I have found two manufactures of sheet feeders for Canon based laser
printers; Ziyad and BTD. They currently work with most all, but the Apple
LaserWriter. Both Ziyad and BDT are having difficulty bringing their
products to market. The delays are reported to be inside Apple.
I am also in desperate need of auxiliary sheet/envelope feeders. Anyone
having a solution to this problem, will be forever in my debt.
For anyone interested in contacted either Ziyad or BDT, I have included
their address and telephone information.
Ziyad, Inc. BDT Products, Inc.
100 Ford Road 17152 Armstrong Ave.
Denville, NJ 07834 Irvine, CA 92714
(800) 992-0262 (714) 660-1386
in NJ (201) 627-7600
--RON--
ron%tp4@rand-unix.arparoy@phri.UUCP (08/04/86)
In article <8608012132.AA19422@tp4> ron%tp4@RAND-UNIX.ARPA (Ron Shell) writes: > I have found two manufactures of sheet feeders for Canon based laser > printers; Ziyad and BTD. [typo? shouldn't it be BDT?? -- RHS] Without seeing the BDT feeder for the LaserWriter, I'm afraid I must warn people to be wary of it. The following story is anectodatal evidence that BDT is a company to be avoided. All that means is that I got burned by them; I don't have any hard evidence that on the whole they are any better or worse than any other supplier. Several years ago we bought a NEC-7700 spinwriter (a workhorse of a printer if I ever saw one; we've got several, one of which is about 5 years old and still pounding out hundreds of pages a day). At the same time, we bought a BDT cut-sheet feeder to go along with it. At the time (and maybe still?) they were the only people who made a feeder which could handle 2 paper trays plus envelopes. To make a long story short, it didn't work. First, all the documentation we got was a couple of xerox sheets. Eventually I got out of them the escape codes to make the thing work (switch trays, etc). Since this thing had 3 trays and the spinwriter was designed to work with a 2-tray feeder, BDT had replaced the ROMs in the spinwriter with new ones to implement a third tray-select code. So, I got it set up and started playing with it. It seemed to work for a while, but then the spinwriter started to act up. After printing a few pages it would loose track of where the left margin is. Aparantly, the new ROM program would occasionally cause this soft margin to be forgotten. In retrospect, it had all the symptoms of a lost interrupt or similar timing problem. It was really strange to see it print 15 pages OK and then all of a sudden indent everything a couple of extra inches. Another dozen pages or so, and *zap*, another few inches (the same amount, BTW). After chasing assorted wild geese (I was convinced it was nroff's fault for a long time; something weird in the header or footer macros) I called up BDT to report my troubles. Their attitude was "Of course our product works; it must be your software." I went through all sorts of tests (swapping boards between spinwriters, different ways to prepare the text) and became more and more convinced that it must be the sheet feeder's fault, but they wouldn't budge. Months later, they finally admitted that yes, there was a problem and they were working on fixing it. I tried to get them to at least send me the original ROMs back so I could get the spinwriter to work, but they wouldn't do that. It was something like 6 months later (after repeated phone calls from me) that I finally got a new set of ROMs to install. These didn't work either. By this time, we had long since given up on the sheet feeder and went out and bought a plain-old tractor feed. The bottom line was several hundred ($1k? -- I really don't remember any more) down the drain. The spinwriter is in daily use (we got vanilla ROMs somewhere -- I think a nice NEC service guy had sympathy on us and "donated" them) and the sheet feeder is still gathering dust in my office. We never got a single day's work out of it, and never got our money back either. Anybody want to buy it, cheap?