BEC.SHAPIN@ECLA.USC.EDU (Ted Shapin) (06/28/88)
Summary of user experience with Data Products LZR2665. - - - - Date: Wed, 8 Jun 88 18:23 MST From: <JMS@mis.arizona.edu> Subject: RE: Any experience with Data Products LZR2665? Yes, we have a 2665. I would only buy another one if: 1) you can PROVE that you print at least 30,000 pages a month. If you don't, it's not cost effective (compared to HP Laserjet) 2) you can get a GOOD maintenance vendor. The box is a heavy duty thing, and needs maintenance every four or five weeks. We did a quarter of a million pages last year and went through a lot of maintenance time. Make sure you have someone in town who can work on a 26xx printer, or who can get to your site in an hour or so. Plan to spend about $4000/year on maintenance contracts. It's a really, really fast printer (prints the equivalent of 52 pages a minute when doing what we call "2-up portrait" mode), and that beats ANYTHING else on campus, including the 1000 lpm monsters. On the other hand, it is touchy and does NOT have as good print quality as the Laserwriter or Laser Jet Series II. It is an excellent and cost effective substitute for your 14 7/8 x 11 printers, but is not really in the "final copy" class of printer, except when finely tuned. Call me if you have questions. jms +----------------------------+ BITNET: jms@arizmis.BITNET |Joel M Snyder | Inter: jms@mis.arizona.edu |Univ of Arizona Dep't of MIS| Phone: 602.621.2748 ICBM: 32 13 N / 110 58 W |Tucson, AZ 85721 | Quote: "Design is everything. +----------------------------+ Implementation is trivial." - - - - Date: Sun, 19 Jun 88 22:05:03 edt From: Peter Marshall <peter%julian.uwo.ca@CORNELLC.CCS.CORNELL.EDU> Organization: University of Western Ontario, London We have had our 2665 printer for about a year and a half now. It has run off a lot of copies. I suspect that there might be better printers out there by now, but it was probably the best at the time. Our major problems with it have been 1. It is a "write-white" printer, which means that the "off-the-shelf" TEX fonts look pretty bad on it. I think that we now have a version of TEX that is using the built in fonts and will be soon getting a set of TEX fonts tuned to a write-white printer. 2. We have one operator that can't tell the difference between developer and toner. The Developer has metal filings in it that really grind down some of the plastic gears and things. One operator made this mistake twice with about 4 months between. 3. As more MACs show up, they expect all the 30 or so fonts that come with the latest apple-writers and the dataproducts still only has helvetica, times-roman courier and symbols. 4. Supplies have sometimes been slow in arriving. But then this is Canada! The apple printers are up-ward compatible with this one and when-ever the dataproducts is down for fixing, we swap in a spare apple laser writer and people don't complain much. The apple's printing is typically much darker, but perhaps less precise on fine lines. The write white causes problems with some graphics packages that write or shade with single pixel lines, they hardly show on the 2665. I guess we might buy another... -- Peter Marshall, Data Comm. Manager CCS, U. of Western Ontario, London, Canada N6A 5B7 (519)661-2151x6032 pm@uwovax.BITNET; peter@julian.uucp; peter.marshall@uwo.ca - - - - Date: Thu, 23 Jun 88 10:57 PDT From: Andrew Birner <Andrew-Birner%ZENITH.CP6%LADC@BCO-MULTICS.ARPA> Subject: LZR2665 experiences on CP-6 References: Any experience with Data Products LZR2665? We have an LZR2665, running off our CP-6 (I think you've heard of it;-)) system. We've had very little difficulty with it. We run about 1000 pages per day through the printer, though not all of these are printed (we stick a blank separator sheet between jobs--colored paper, so that our operators can find jobs without reading every page). It has a very high duty cycle--several hundred thousand pages, as I recall. We've had it about a year and a half, now. We use the printer mostly for line-printer emulation, a task to which it is particularly well suited. For single-font use, we get 20 to 26 pages per minute, depending on the density of the page. The 1500-sheet power feeder is absolutely wonderful; we just fill it every other day or so, and it takes care of itself. Our operators love it. We also do graphics, using the device as a plotter--the optional 11x17 paper tray is invaluable. The only problem with this gadget is its memory and processor speed. There is only about 150K of VM available. This makes it very difficult to use ANY expansion fonts, especially Adobe's (which take up about 40K each). In fact, with our permanent context (banner routines, Xerox Emulator and fonts, etc.) in place, we only have 90K left; if we install an Adobe font, we can't download a MS Word file to use it--the msdict header takes up too much room! As for processors, the LZR2665 uses the old Redstone controller, so it is very slow for complex multi-font documents. The good news is that DataProducts already has one Atlas-based printer, the LZR1200; rumor has it that they're working on retro-fitting the Atlas to the 2665 engine (it would replace the current controller). If they go ahead with this project, they would have a really slick machine on their hands. All in all, for what we wanted it for when we bought it, we'd buy it again in a minute. We're starting to feel the limitations, though, so we might look elsewhere, were we starting from scratch with our current needs. How- ever, if they were to make an Atlas controller available, we'd buy it in a minute! - Andy - -------