sklein@cdp.UUCP (06/05/89)
I'm about to get a new Laser printer at my office. We are looking at Apple's LaserWriter IINT and GCC Technologies Business Laser Printer Does anyone have the Business LP? Is it reliable? How easy (hard) is it to change the toner? The drum? Do any other parts need to be changed? Does it tend to jam? Does toner get scattered inside, and if so, is it easy to clean? In short, what does everyone recommend, the Apple IINT or the GCC BLP? -shabtai cdp!sklein@arisia.xerox.com or uunet!pyramid!cdp!sklein
suitti@haddock.ima.isc.com (Stephen Uitti) (06/07/89)
In article <141200045@cdp> sklein@cdp.UUCP writes: > >I'm about to get a new Laser printer at my office. We are looking at >Apple's LaserWriter IINT and GCC Technologies Business Laser Printer > >Does anyone have the Business LP? Is it reliable? How easy (hard) is >it to change the toner? The drum? Do any other parts need to be changed? >Does it tend to jam? Does toner get scattered inside, and if so, is it >easy to clean? > >In short, what does everyone recommend, the Apple IINT or the GCC BLP? I have the non-postscript GCC PLP at home. I have experience (at work, etc.) with Apple's older Laserwritter Plus, and LaserWritter II NT. I've had the PLP for about a year now. I'm working on my second toner cartridge (I've only printed about 2000 pages). The output quality is still "new". I had some problems with output quality after a paper jam in December. I took it apart & cleaned the drum (took a little while to get it right). Under normal use (i'm the only one who opens my printer, and i'm *real careful*), toner stays where it is supposed to. The manual says that if you spill toner into the printer, put the machine back in the box & send it to GCC for cleaning. I use my PLP with my Mac II. I use Canvas 2.0, Digital Darkroom, MicroSoft Word 4.0, and others. In my situation, Postscript is not as good as "quickdraw". The only times i've wanted to print something in Postscript was to get a higher quality (2540) DPI Linotronics page or two (a local service provides access). In these cases, I've always had pure-object artwork. The PLP was fine for preview editing. This service also has some LaserWriter II NT's, for final proofing. There are other reasons to use Postscript (such as owning some brain damaged software that only works with this type of printer). For me, though, it is slower (both the Mac and the printer have to format the page), and more expensive (I could by a huge disk & backup system for the difference in price). The quickdraw PLP comes with some outline fonts (which don't match all of Adobe's fonts), does a reasonable job with scaled screen fonts (there's a font smoothing option), does a reasonable job with 72 DPI graphics (there's a bitmap smoothing option), and of course, does awesome 300 DPI graphics. A couple people i know bought Mac II's got them with the extended keyboard. When i asked why, the response was, "if you spend 5 grand on the machine, what's an extra 20 bucks?". My answer is, "The bigger keyboard is not as good. It doesn't fit in your lap, it takes up more of your desk, it has the control key in the wrong place, there isn't anything you can do with it that you can't do with the standard keyboard." I use similar logic when describing Adobe's Postscript. Stephen.