evans@mhuxt.UUCP (Sukie Crandall) (06/24/87)
Brian Diehm writes: >Rumors continue unabated in the press about Apple bringing out a low-cost LaserWriter without PostScript. Target price appears to be <$2000. It would have a built-in QuickDraw RIP. < ...< I agree that a LW- without postscript would be a loose. One thing that may happen which would put real pressure on Apple to not come out with something totally braindamaged is the advent of Postscript clones. Apparently a half dozen or so companies are frantically working on postscript clones to get in on the PS market which is completely held by Adobe (with their $1000+ per printer license!). The differences will be in the way bitmaps are handled with some of the clone makers hinting that they can make their clones much faste r than conventional PS. It will be interesting to watch. With IBM and others endorsing the PS standard along with the advent of clones, we should see add-on hardware kits for generic PC laserprinters, new laserprinters bundled with the PS clones, and (the neatest rumor I've heard) "software" solutions that would run the PS clone stuff on the Mac itself. They would be slow, but if you didn't have much work to do a $1500 lp and a few hundred buck piece of software may be the ticket (esp when Macs get multitasking!). Any of the above will put pressure on Apple and Adobe. The high end of the market won't be affected, but the rest of us with a < $2k threshold for a laserprinter may actually see progress in the next year. Steve Crandall ihnp4!research!polya!evans
hayes@wizard.ucsd.edu (James Hayes) (06/26/87)
evans@mhuxt.UUCP (Sukie Crandall) writes in article <1793@mhuxt.UUCP>: > > [...] Apparently a half >dozen or so companies are frantically working on postscript clones to get in >on the PS market which is completely held by Adobe (with their $1000+ per >printer license!). $1000+? Isn't it more like $100? (Does anyone really know?) Considering that Apple provided the seed money for Adobe, what kind of license do they pay per LaserWriter? (BTW: The CS dept. at UCSD has 2 QMS/Talaris PS800 Postscript printers that work flawlessly with Mac generated Postscript. [A tad faster too...] :-) Jim Hayes, University of California at San Diego. BITNET: hayes%sdcsvax@WISCVM.BITNET ARPA: hayes@sdcsvax.ucsd.edu UUCP: {pick one close to berkeley}!sdcsvax!hayes
zrm@eddie.MIT.EDU (Zigurd R. Mednieks) (06/30/87)
In article <1793@mhuxt.UUCP> evans@mhuxt.UUCP (Sukie Crandall) writes: > >Brian Diehm writes: >>Rumors continue unabated in the press about Apple bringing out a low-cost >LaserWriter without PostScript. Target price appears to be <$2000. It would >have a built-in QuickDraw RIP. >...< >I agree that a LW- without postscript would be a loose. One thing that may I don't agree that not having Postscript would make a losing laserwriter. It would take too long to spell it out, but it looks as though there are very few things that a QuickDraw printer couldn't do. You couldn't program it like a LaserWriter, but you could print text at the same qality as the current LaserWriter, and you could print graphics (at least Quickdraw-originated graphics) with the same quality too. Anything that could not be done through abstractions in the printer driver could be handled through driver control calls. In addition, such a printer wouln't need neccessarily need a separate processor -- the Macintosh itself could create and tranfer bits fast enough. $2000? Where do I sign? -Zigurd
stew@endor.harvard.edu (Stew Rubenstein) (07/01/87)
In article <6224@eddie.MIT.EDU> zrm@eddie.MIT.EDU (Zigurd R. Mednieks) writes: >In article <1793@mhuxt.UUCP> evans@mhuxt.UUCP (Sukie Crandall) writes: >> >>Brian Diehm writes: >>>Rumors continue unabated in the press about Apple bringing out a low-cost >>LaserWriter without PostScript. Target price appears to be <$2000. It would >>have a built-in QuickDraw RIP. >>...< >>I agree that a LW- without postscript would be a loose. One thing that may > >I don't agree that not having Postscript would make a losing >laserwriter. It would take too long to spell it out, but it looks as >though there are very few things that a QuickDraw printer couldn't do. There are a zillion advanced graphics concepts in PostScript that are light-years ahead of quickdraw. It's a shame that PostScript was never supported properly by Apple - there'd be some dynamite possibilities if PostScript supplanted QuickDraw completely. Any graphics system which can't even draw an oval at an arbitrary angle is not worth beans. And if you've compared the results of PostScript's line-joining to the "pen hangs below and to the right of the current point" nonsense, you'll agree that the results even for simple graphics are superior. I only hope that the people making this decision at Apple know enough about the advantages of PostScript over QuickDraw to make an informed decision, and that the legal problems of licensing PostScript for the Macintosh itself (as opposed to in the printer) are not insurmountable. Stew Rubenstein Cambridge Scientific Computing, Inc. UUCPnet: seismo!harvard!rubenstein CompuServe: 76525,421 Internet: rubenstein@harvard.harvard.edu MCIMail: CSC