abc@adm.BRL.MIL (Brint Cooper) (01/14/89)
"Comb," a direct marketing, mail-order house is advertising a $2495 "Genicom" laser printer made by Centronics for $799. The announcement gives little infomation beyond: IBM and Epson compatible 300 dots per inch 8 pages per minute 512K RAM with additional 1.5MB available parallel interface optional plug in font modules available Can anyone provide additional information? What language does it use? Does it employ a compatible engine? Is it worth the money? Please post replies to comp.text or send e-mail. Thanks. _Brint Cooper <abc@brl.mil> -- Brint Cooper
mason@tmsoft.uucp (Dave Mason) (01/24/89)
In article <18097@adm.BRL.MIL> abc@adm.BRL.MIL (Brint Cooper) writes: > >"Comb," a direct marketing, mail-order house is advertising a $2495 >"Genicom" laser printer made by Centronics for $799. This is a very good price! But I don't think that I would buy a laser printer from a mail order house. But my opinion may be biased (I am a dealer in Toronto and I'm offering them at well below suggested clearance list, but that's well below MY COST with 1.5MB!) > The announcement >gives little infomation beyond: > > IBM and Epson compatible > 300 dots per inch > 8 pages per minute > 512K RAM with additional 1.5MB available > parallel interface > optional plug in font modules available I wonder how much the 1MB expansion is? That MAY be the catch. My price includes 1.5MB (total, which is the max). There are only 3 resident fonts: Courier in portrait & landscape; LinePrinter in portrait. It is supposed to accept Laserjet+ font cards, but I haven't tried as I'm using down-loaded fonts (see below), for which you'll almost certainly want more memory. >Can anyone provide additional information? I have one here. For background: Centronics was bought by Genicom. This printer was in the Centronics product line. They are not making any more, but have promised support for 5 years. When these are all sold, they will not have a laser printer for about 6 months (I am told) after which they will reenter the market with a Postscript Clone at about $4000-7000 (the price was far more than I was interested in, so I didn't pay much attention). > What language does it use? It's MOSTLY HP Laserjet Plus compatible. There are 2 differences. The important one is that with down-loaded fonts, the font must be completely down-loaded before use. With a Laserjet Plus, you can down-load a few characters in a font, and then add more to it when necessary. (Useful for a large font where you only need a few characters.) The dvijep filter uses the incremental download feature and needs minor modification. The other one was obscure & I forgot it as not relevant. The Genicom people DID NOT KNOW about the incremental down-load incompatibility! >Does it employ a compatible engine? Canon >Is it worth the money? I like it, and my answer about whether you should buy from them may be tinged with self-interest. Try a local dealer, you may get almost as good a price, and get some support as well. I'm selling them for about 2/3 what a HP Laserjet+ goes for, and I think they're a good value at that price. ../Dave
rick@pcrat.UUCP (Rick Richardson) (01/25/89)
In article <1989Jan24.005723.5667@tmsoft.uucp> mason@tmsoft.UUCP (Dave Mason) writes: >It's MOSTLY HP Laserjet Plus compatible. There are 2 differences. >The important one is that with down-loaded fonts, the font must be >completely down-loaded before use. With a Laserjet Plus, you can >down-load a few characters in a font, and then add more to it when >necessary. >good a price, and get some support as well. I'm selling them for about >2/3 what a HP Laserjet+ goes for, and I think they're a good value at >that price. Not being able to do incremental font downloads is a serious performance loss. Personally, I would not sacrifice this capability for the 1/3 price savings. There is a growing assortment of software written to take advantage of incremental download. Furthermore, if you have the incremental download capability like the HP LaserJet Series II, it is *extremely* unlikely that you would need additional RAM beyond the standard 512 Kbytes. Only if you need to do an entire page of 300 dpi bitmap graphics would you run into memory problems. The fonts would almost never run you out of memory. Point of fact is that I've printed many large documents on the LaserJet Series II that used 24 different font/size combinations (but no more than 16 per page) and have never run out of memory on the basic LaserJet Series II. In conclusion, I would avoid this printer. -- Rick Richardson | JetRoff "di"-troff to LaserJet Postprocessor|uunet!pcrat!dry2 PC Research,Inc.| Mail: uunet!pcrat!jetroff; For anon uucp do:|for Dhrystone 2 uunet!pcrat!rick| uucp jetroff!~jetuucp/file_list ~nuucp/. |submission forms. jetroff Wk2200-0300,Sa,Su ACU {2400,PEP} 12013898963 "" \d\r\d ogin: jetuucp