sml@wdl1.UUCP (Steve Lazarus) (06/06/87)
After the QMS report in MacWorld I arranged a loaner of a QMS 800+ and
have performed some benchmarking of this printer and the Laserwriter
Plus. I also benchmarked with the new (4.0) laserprinter driver and
prep file which gives some dramatic improvements. All tests were
performed using SuperLaser Spool. Printing was disabled, the document
spooled, and printing from the spooler enabled. Timing was from the
time of the "resume" command to the final page of output.
All tests were performed on using a Mac Plus and System 3.2. (I
assume that the system file doesn't matter for printing.)
The documents are:
1. Slides - A PowerPoint slide presentation consisting of 13
individual slide pages and handout pages which are printed 3 slides to
a page (4 pages with 3 slides per page and a final page with 1 slide).
This would qualify as graphics intensive. This is actually 2
consecutive print jobs.
2. Word 3.0 - A Word 3.0 document of 11 pages. This document has no
graphics and uses 2 built in fonts and our "Dearborn" font which
consists of one character, the Ford logo.
3. Excel - A 7 page Excel output. Each page had borders around each
printed cell. Gridlines and column headings were turned off.
Here are the timings (in minutes and seconds).
Slides Excel Word
Apple Laserwriter 3.1 18:10 18:10 4:40
QMS Laserwriter 3.1 10:30 15:30 3:10
Apple Laserwriter 4.0 13:45 10:50 2:45
QMS Laserwriter 4.0 9:10 11:25 2:25
The QMS shows across the board advantages with the old driver. With
the new driver the advantage is dramatic only with the slides. Excel
is actually slower. (I was so surprised by this that I repeated the
test. The numbers displayed here are an average of the two runs. The
QMS varied by 10 seconds and the Apple by 25.)
Steve Lazarus (415) 852-4203
Ford Aerospace ...sun!wdl1!sml (UUCP)
MS X-20 sml@ford-wdl1.arpa (ARPA)
3939 Fabian Way
Palo Alto, CA 94303