john@spock.UUCP (John Desrochers) (10/20/89)
I am posting this for a friend who has no direct net access;
I will collect any and all responses & pass them on him.
John
Mitel --> ...!uunet!mitel!spock!john
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greetings.
i must choose what laser printer our group is to purchase.
my boss has listed several features and restrictions, which are:
- DEC compatibility :-(
- speed over 10 pages per minutes (15 would be good)
- large paper tray (500 pages/tray)
- up to around 12000$ (canadian) (around 9000$ US)
-- more if the printer is very good
- be able to print TeX files
- service in the montreal region a plus
i have added:
- postscript compatibility
- HP LaserJet and/or HP-GL emulation would be nice
the 500 sheet-tray seems unlikely to me; most of those i have
seen have 250 a sheet-tray with one or two optional supplementary trays.
also, i don't think TeX will need anything special, if the printer
uses postscript. (am i wrong?)
my boss recently changed the priority of this from `think about it' to
`top-of-the-heap important'. most of the searching i have done has been in
digital review (05 december 1988 and 28 august 1989). i have come up
with the following printers which would be acceptable:
- laser leader mark I (by BGL technology corp.)
- LZR 1260 (dataproducts corp.)
- LaserImage 3000-IS (personal computer products inc.)
- QMS-PS 1500 (QMS inc.)
- 1590 printstation (talaris)
- PageLaser 12 (toshiba)
- LCS 15-DSK (wang laboratories inc.)
any and all comments are welcome. in particular, i am looking for
your experiences with any of these printers, or with any you know which
would fit the above requirements. i would also appreciate sources
(other than digital review) on laser printers.
if there is sufficient interest, i will summarize and post
the answers i receive.
thanks in advance for your help.
marc desrochers
national research council, canada
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the government of canada is an equal opportunity destroyer.danny@idacom.UUCP (Danny Wilson) (10/29/89)
In article <8910201448.AA11309@crayola.cs.UMD.EDU>, john@spock.UUCP (John Desrochers) writes: > - laser leader mark I (by BGL technology corp.) > - LZR 1260 (dataproducts corp.) > - LaserImage 3000-IS (personal computer products inc.) > - QMS-PS 1500 (QMS inc.) > - 1590 printstation (talaris) > - PageLaser 12 (toshiba) > - LCS 15-DSK (wang laboratories inc.) We are looking (very hard) at buying an IMAGEN 5320 XP. From what it appears, this is a very heavy duty printer with 20 ppm 2000 sheet feeder 2 x 250 sheet feeders Postscript etc Does anyone have any experience with this printer?? I don't know where the Montreal office is, but try QMS Computer products (they bought out imagen) Calgary (403)266-3500 -- Danny Wilson IDACOM Electronics danny@idacom.uucp Edmonton, Alberta alberta!idacom!danny C A N A D A X.400 danny@idacom.cs.ubc.cdn
us214777@mmm.serc.3m.com (John C. Schultz) (10/30/89)
I purchased a LZR 1260 partially based on a demo and partially based on a review that rated the LZR highly for a commercial strength laser printer. I wanted a printer that was reasonably fast and could be expected to work long after a Laserwriter II had given up. My initial goals were high resolution because I like to print images. However since the same laser printer needed to serve as a line printer, I found the print speed of the higher resolution printers unacceptable when printing simple text (a software switchable high-low resolution mode would be nice). BTW, the slow print speed at higher resolution comes from simply having to manipulate more pixels to print the same area of paper - obvious when you think about it. Anyway, I ended up with the LZR 1260 running from a Sun 3/160, SunOS 4.0.3 using a /dev/ttya at 38400 baud. We use a public domain text to PS filter dvi2ps to print LaTeX dvi files, and Frame. The unit is theoretically switchable from HP emulation mode to PS mode but we could only get it to go from HP to PS mode not from PS to HP mode. We leave it in PS mode and use the text to PS filter to have it emulate a lineprinter. (This acutally has advantages because it is easy to scale the font size and do landscape or portrait mode printing.) About the printer itself, I just followed the directions, and it worked in about 20 minutes of setup time. It came pretty disassembled but was easy to put together. A nice feature is an internal bubble level and some supplied shims to make sure it is level. I timed the print speed relative to a Laser writer II for a simple text file and for a .5 MB image file. The LZR at 38400 baud was took about 3 minutes to print the text file vs about 10 seconds longer for the Laserwriter II (Appletalk connected to a VAX 11/780). The suprising thing was that the .5 MB image file (a 512 x 512 x 8 bits/pixel file Postscript's to .5 MB) printed almost twice as fast on the LZR as it did on the Laserwriter II. The only problems that I have seen are that the SUN print spooler seems to slow the printer down somewhat and the paper transport squeaks. The printer does have RS232, Appletalk, and Centronics parallel input if that is of interest. Perhaps the thing I like the best is that you can connect a terminal to a diagnostic port and see the Postscript being executed and/or get errors. You also have a relatively sophisticated menu pad on the printer from which it is easy to select input data port, serial line parameters, etc. You can buy dual paper trays and lots of other things. I think we paid about $7,000. For this price you get at least double the Laserwriter II suggested copies per month. (I forget the exact number). -- John C. Schultz EMAIL: jcschultz@mmm.3m.com 3M Company WRK: +1 (612) 733 4047 3M Center, Building 518-01-1 St. Paul, MN 55144-1000 The opinions expressed above are my own and DO NOT reflect 3M's
henry@utzoo.UUCP (11/16/89)
>... I think we paid about >$7,000. For this price you get at least double the Laserwriter II >suggested copies per month. (I forget the exact number). I hope this wasn't the major criterion for buying the printer. If so, you may have spent more than you had to. The copies/month number for big laser printers must be taken seriously, but there are people who run the little Canon engines (LaserJet and Laserwriter families, for example) at 10 times the rated copies/month with no ill effects. We don't go that far, but it would be a very unusual month in which we *didn't* exceed the copies/month spec. Those print engines are very tolerant of abuse, much more so than their more expensive cousins. (Consider: what exactly would go wrong at higher print rates? The big printers get various forms of maintenance every N weeks, but most everything on the little Canon printers happens when you change the cartridge... and if you print more, you change cartridges more often.) If you want a commercial maintenance contract, mind you, that may be a constraint. Maintenance companies get upset when you violate even meaningless specs. Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu
john@trigraph.UUCP (John Chew) (11/22/89)
In <8911150344.AA03590@crayola.cs.UMD.EDU> Danny Wilson <danny@idacom.UUCP> writes: >I don't know where the Montreal office is, but try > > QMS Computer products (they bought out imagen) From a glossy dated 7/89, their head office is: QMS Canada, Inc. 9692 Trans Canada Highway St. Laurent, Quebec Canada H4S 1V9 +1 514 333 5940 FAX: ... 5949 John -- john j. chew, iii phone: +1 416 425 3818 AppleLink: CDA0329 trigraph, inc., toronto, canada {uunet!utai!utcsri,utgpu,utzoo}!trigraph!john dept. of math., u. of toronto poslfit@{utorgpu.bitnet,gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca}