bobvan (11/01/82)
I asked for information on laser printers several weeks ago. I apologize for being lax in getting a summary posted, but better late than never. I am very grateful to those who responded to me, especially Rick Furuta. I'll give a brief summary of my findings here and will mail the raw information to anyone who is interested. There are three printers that we seriously considered: the Symbolics LGP-1, the Imagen IMPRINT-10, and the Xerox 2700. We did not consider the DEC LN-01 because it is not yet available. When it does arrive, I am told it will use the Xerox 2700 printing engine. The Imagen and Symbolics both use the Cannon printing engine and are roughly equivalent. Both come with software interfaces for troff and plenty of fonts. TeX and Scribe drivers either are or will be available. Both can be connected to your machine over a standard 9.6k or 19.2k serial line. Symbolics also has interfaces for a Centronics standard 8-bit parallel and high speed 16-bit parallel. Imagen has been shipping for over a year, as of two weeks ago Smybolics had yet to ship their first printer. Imagen costs ~30k$, Symbolics about 25k$. Imagen has service available in some cities, Smybolics is negotiating with a service contractor. Imagen will do 240X480 dots/inch, Symbolics 480/480. In summary, Symbolics seems to have a slightly better product for less money but it is not an established product. We have ordered one. The Xerox is in a different class. Cost is 19k$, lease is about $650/mo., resolution is 300X300, full service support is available, interface is through serial line only. It has several nice fonts and can draw lines with escape sequences, but you can't get at the individual dots on the page. You can define your own fonts and down load them. Naturally, there is no troff interface. It seems that nroff -Txerox might be more appropriate. Bob Van Valzah (...!decvax!ittvax!tpdcvax!bobvan)