phil@RICE.EDU (William LeFebvre) (06/02/86)
> Imagen makes reasonable printers, but I would have to say that they > are one of the worst companies to deal with when something doesn't > work right. Imagen seems to think they know all the answers and that > their customers should learn to accept what is "best" for them. I have said this before in this forum and I will say it again now. I have heard several complaints about Imagen's customer service, yet I continue to find them a very pleasant and helpful company to deal with when "something goes wrong". We have had several hardware related problems with our 8/300. In every instance, I called California and talked to someone in hardware support. And every time the person was very helpful and very willing to sit on the phone with me and help me with my particular problem. We were usually able to isolate the problem and take a very positive step toward correcting it. While I am at it, I feel I should mention the names of two individuals in hardware support whom I have dealt with during the past year and a half and who have been extra wonderful about helping me: John Lang (I don't even know if he still works there) and Charlie Ward. Now, granted, all of our problems have been hardware problems. I have never had the necessity to deal with the "applications support" people. But I have always found the hardware people very willing to help and very good at correcting problems *over the phone*. There is one down side to their customer support. They have very little support outside of California. The big companies---DEC and IBM for example---have very good field service support. Imagen does not. They attempt to do their field service through other organizations, and this is not working well at all. > One advantage (debatable) that Imagen claims to have is direct > connection to Ethernet. I don't see this as much of an advantage > since host computers have to have fonts, filters, and formatters > anyway. The network connection also increases the price of their > hardware. True, the network connection increases the cost. But it does have a distinct advantage. Since the host has to have, as you said, all the "fonts, filters, and formatters", more data than just the document and the formatting instructions gets shipped to the printer---the font bitmaps get shipped as well. This can be a considerable amount of data. The ethernet has the potential to move this data much faster than a 9600 baud serial line does. I have done no actual comparisons, but I suspect that an ethernet Imagen printer in fact does receive this data faster than 9600 baud. There is also the advantage that the printer can be put anywhere where the ethernet is run (and enough space on the coax exists). You don't need to run a special line to the printer. William LeFebvre Department of Computer Science Rice University <phil@Rice.edu>