greenber@swatsun.uucp (Peter Greenberg) (01/20/88)
I saw these stats in Digital Review, 11 Jan 1988 pg. 70, on the NEC Silentwriter
printer.
There were many other printers listed but this seemed the most cost-effective.
And it is made by a Japanese company that won't go away any time soon.
- Non-lasing LED engine (proprietary?)
- 8 ppm
- 300 dpi
- 3000 copies per toner cartridge, $20/cartridge
- 5000 copies/month, manufacturer's figures
- $399 routine maintenance every 100,000 copies, vendor didn't know exactly what
- Diablo 630, HP LJ+ emulations
- PostScript, 35 Adobe (LW+) fonts
- Alleged "3 MB memory" in salestalk with vendor, processor???
- Centronics, RS232C, RS422, AppleTalk
- 8.5 x 11, legal, European
- Desktop size
- lists $4795, quotes in NYC at $3500 range
- compare $4000 quote for LW+, $100/cartridge
Seems pretty good. Sales person mentioned some problem with Centronics from PC's
but I want to run off Sun3 on serial. Are the operating costs as
low as advertized? As a side, anyone know how these non-LW machines do with Mac
boxes which I think sometimes do strange things, like down load machine code?
Anyone know the processor? Is this better than an LW+, or worse, for the $$$ ?
Is it selling well enough that the carts. will be long available?
Summaries to the net.
Peter
--
Peter Greenberg, ImClone Systems, 180 Varick St., 7th Fl. New York, NY 10014
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I work for ImClone, graduated from Swarthmore, neither cares what I say.lharris@gpu.utcs.toronto.edu (Leonard Harris) (01/23/88)
I've used one of these for a while and I recommend you stay away from it. There are known bugs in the serial port communications routines (at least when we called NEC they told us to use the parallel port) and we also found that the parallel port drops characters when the printer is busy calculating (our software is heavy on macros)). We have also had one die after 3 month's use. NEC told us they are working on the problems and when the machine works the output is very nice - just not worth the aggravation. /leonard
pla@zippy.eecs.umich.edu (Paul Anderson) (01/26/88)
In article <1988Jan22.185018.1516@gpu.utcs.toronto.edu> lharris@gpu.utcs.UUCP (Leonard Harris) writes: > >I've used one of these for a while and I recommend you stay away from it. ... >problems and when the machine works the output is very nice - just not >worth the aggravation. >/leonard Yours might be a lemon. I've been very happy with mine except for two things: 1) it leaves dots (2 or 3) at the top right of the first page of a job 2) The physical page is very slightly narrower than a LaserWriter Plus, so programs that don't let you tweak the margins slightly may give clipped pages (about 1 column on the left for my machine). I've dumped several thousand pages of various documents and screen dumps, and haven't yet noticed any problems other than these two. I managed to get a nasty paper jam (I overfilled the paper tray) that left toner all over the drum once, but I was able to disassemble it, clean it, and get it all working again. All in all, I like the machine a lot, and other than some design desicions that I don't agree with, it is a well designed and constructed machine. Paul Anderson
pjh@mccc.UUCP (Peter J. Holsberg) (01/31/88)
Does anyone have any experience with the AST Turbolaser/PS? It seems to
be a direct competitor for the LC-890 and the street price is a few
hundred dollars less.
--
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