wtm@neoucom.UUCP (Bill Mayhew) (05/11/88)
----- News saved at 10 May 88 19:27:19 GMT I can heartily recommend the HP Desk Jet. I just bought one for $615*. It certainly delivers the best price / performance ratio I am aware of. The ink cartridges have a list price of $18, but are available locally for about $10. The cartidges are rated for "500,000" characters average life. I am assuming they mean draft mode, but I'm not sure since I haven't drained the first cartridge yet. *The list price is $995.95 or something like that, but HP routinely discounts stuff by 30+% though our university purchase program. I suspect that similar mark downs are available through corporate programs, etc. One local PC store was willing to offer a simlar 30% "discount" when I walked in off the street. HP rates the printer for a 5 year life expectancy given a "light" duty of "only" 50 pages per day. I disassembled my printer as soon as I got it, and this seems reasonable. The most likely parts to go bad are some wheels that are cut from closed-cell foam that are used in the feed mechanism. There is also an ink blotter sheet in the bottom of the printer that catches any overages from the priming mechanism that might also eventaully need to be changed. The control electonics use a Z8 micro as well as another lage house-numberd gate array. The on-board RAM is 64K, which really isn't enough to do any downloading of fonts, but does make for a great print buffer. The printer is also equipped with BOTH parallel and serial ports, and the active port is automatically sensed. DIP switching is only necessary for buad rates other than 9600. There is a very large ROM that has 32 pins (a 512 K byte ROM??) that would appear to contain the on-board fonts and firmware. The desk jet clocks in at about 120 char/sec in the full density text mode and about 240 in the draft mode. The draft mode is surprisingly good, rivaling the output of most 24 pin printers -- reasonable, since the Desk Jet has a 50 jet printhead. Full density printing is virtually the same as laser print, and will print properly on copier or bond paper. Interestingly, clay finsh "inkjet" paper is actually a detrement in the Desk Jet, as the very close clearance of the printhead results in terrible smearing as the ink beads-up on the clay finish paper. A full resolution page of text can be printed in about 45 seconds. The default font on the Desk Jet is Couier 10 which can also be front panel (and software selected for) 16.7 cpi and 20 cpi via a decimation algorithm in the printer. It's too bad that HP didn't include a nice font, such as Roman, rather than the Courier. I guess they want to make a few extra bucks selling everybody at least on cartridge, they same as they do on the Laser Jet. :-). Graphics mode of the Desk Jet appears to be an exact emulation of the Laser Jet, as several popular packages I've tried (Rix Softworks 2005, Inset, Lotus 1-2-3 2.01, Graph in the Box II) that are set for Laser Jet all produce proper graphics. In the case of Lotus 1-2-3, it took about 20 minutes to do 1/2 page, but installing the driver set from the INCLUDED diskette sped up output dramatically to about 4 minutes for a full page. Interestingly, the Desk Jet apparently has some additional graphics modes that the Laser Jet does not have, becuase the Desk Jet driver running on the Laser Jet rusulted in an incomprehensible mess being printed. Graphics printed with a correct driver do NOT have any noticable horizontal lines that typically plague dot matrix output. The only nasty thing I can say is that printing graphics images that have large solid black regions causes the paper to wrinkle noticably. In this case, the graphics can be put on a Xerox (tm) copier and recopied. This is still likely to be chaeaper than a laser printer, if your office already has a copy machine. Also, the power supply is one of those "lump in a cord" dongle-brick things that is good for stubbing your toe on under your desk. The dongle-brick feeds 11 volts AC to an internal switch mode PC board that derives the necessary printer voltages. This is the only really chintzy thing about the printer. I'd rather pay a little more and settle for a slightly larger printer with the power transformer inside. The Desk Jet ink is also water soluable, so you want to be sure not to expose the output to undue amounts of moisture. Almost all of the construction on the Desk Jet is snap-together plastic, but it is by no means chinty. The only screws present are to afix the main PC board to the cabinet bottom and to hold the platten in place. I also own a NEC P5XL workhorse 24 pin printer that I've been using for sevreal years. In just a few weeks the HP has taken over most of what I was using the P5 for. I still prefer the P5 for those 200 page C source listings I do where quality isn't as important as speed. --Bill
Paul_L_Schauble@cup.portal.com (05/14/88)
Thanks for an excellent review of the Deskjet. Now, has anyone seen the new Canon Bubblejet printer?