olle@isagel.sunet.se (Olle Nilsson at ISAGEL.SUNET.SE) (08/13/88)
I have seen some ads about document feeders to the LaserWriter. We have a LW Plus and would like to be able to select the type of paper for a printout from ANY program. We normally use 3 different paper types but no envelopes. Problem: From what I have heard, these feeders are not reliable. The jam and work slowly. Software is not comfortable to work with (selection of paper type). Is there anything on the market today that would solve my problem? Prices? Where to buy? Are there any not so expensive laser printers that can do this without an expansion feeder? (Below about $15,000?) ________________________________________________________________________________ ____ . Olle Nilsson / / . Dept. of Molecular Biology, University of Stockholm, Sweden /___/ o . OLLE@ISAGEL.SUNET.SE (@SEKTH.BITNET) ________________________________________________________________________________
roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) (08/14/88)
olle@isagel.sunet.se (Olle Nilsson at ISAGEL.SUNET.SE) writes: > I have seen some ads about document feeders to the LaserWriter. We have a > LW Plus and would like to be able to select the type of paper for a > printout from ANY program. We normally use 3 different paper types but no > envelopes. The big company in the cut-sheet-feeder business seems to be BHT, but having been burned by them in the past, I would stay away from them. We bought at sheet feeder from them a few years back for a NEC Spinwriter (at the time, I think they were the only ones with 2 paper types plus envelope capability). We never did get the damn thing to work. It didn't jam, but had a bug in the firmware which caused the Spinwriter to keep loosing the left margin (you have to pull some proms in the printer and replace them with the BHT proms). It took me a long time to figure out what was going wrong and once I did, I took me a long time ton convince BHT that there was a problem, and one which made the produce useless. Eventually, they admitted that they were aware of the problem and would ship me a new set of proms when they were available, which turned out to be like 6 months later. I don't remember what other problems ther were, but as I said, we never got the thing to work at all (even after the 6-month delayed prom change) and eventually just junked it as a total loss. Even assuming the thing works, you still have to deal with the problem that none of the Mac software will know how to deal with switching hoppers on the sheet feeder. One possibility is to simply buy 3 LaserWriters and load a differenct kind of paper in each one! If you are willing to spend $15k on one printer, that amount of money will buy you 3 LW's. -- Roy Smith, System Administrator Public Health Research Institute {allegra,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers}!phri!roy -or- phri!roy@uunet.uu.net "The connector is the network"