christosz@ppc.ubc.CDN ("Christos C. Z.") (08/06/87)
The following is our PERSONAL ONLY experience (and comments) with a TI2115
Postscript Laser printer. If you are interested then ... read on.
A. THE GOOD PART
1) The printer produces EXCELLENT graphics and generally good character
quality printing. The blacks are VERY black and very clear. It comes
with 13 built-in fonts. I would rate the overall printing quality as
"very good".
2) It has a VERY handy control panel, job separation jogger, RS232C with
up to 57.6Kb/s, 2 font cartridge slots (cartridges are not available yet),
3MB of RAM (free memory available on startup is 678.6KB and the size of
the font cache is 243.2KB), 2x250-sheet input trays, MANUAL FEED, HPLJ+,
HPGL,TI855,DIABLO emulation modes, an analog counter to show printed
pages, RS422, Centronics, Appletalk interfaces. The printer comes with
a 68HC000 instead of a 68020 as it was initially announced.
3) It comes with Postscript Version 45. So far Postscript worked O.K.
We found that there is NO way to get the rated 15ppm speed except if
you use the printer in one of its line printer emulation mode. We found
that the laser-engine is most of the time idle than the Adobe controller.
4) The single-pixel-uniformity problem and the development-drawer problem
that appeared on the early TI2115's have been fixed so the output looks
good now.
B. THE BAD PART
1) There are bugs in the ROM firmware. The printer has 6 emulation
modes. To change from one to another it takes 1-4 seconds depending
on the mode. During that time the printer becomes ... INVISIBLE !
Everything that had been sent to the printer while it was changing
modes is ... either lost or chopped. TI advices to create a file
with 20,000 NULL characters (?) and queue it to the printer in order
to create the necessary delay required !
2) In the HPGL plotter mode: If you get in then you can't get out!
(i.e. modes are not anymore software selectable). You have to do it
through the control panel. If you send 2 consecutive HPGL plotfiles
to the queue without having a 04 HEX (^D) after the submission of each
job then the printer ... merges both files in one, i.e. it does not
separate plot jobs. (The same happens if 2 or more users send plots to
the printer. The printer merges their plots and produces one ... overlay
plot as output! Only the ^D fixes the problem).
4) When you print very long jobs on the TI855 emulation mode then
the printer hangs! (TI advises to use DIABLO mode instead.)
(TI has aknowledged all the ROM related problems above and they
are committed to fix them in the next ROM release version).
5) There are some problems concerning the quality of the OPC cartridge.
It has been found, in some cases, to last less than the rated 20,000
revolutions. Its surface sometimes gets "dirty" with tiny black spots
that don't go away easily and are visible on the printed output pages.
TI is investigating into these problems.
6) T.I. guarantees error-proof transmission on the RS232C interface only up
to 19.2kb/s speeds. (They advise that depending on your installation you
might get errors when using higher speeds.)
7) Printing TEX output( and using the ARBORTEXT Postscript driver) we found
that we needed special "write-white" fonts in order to get good quality
output (the standard Canon fonts do not look good at all). The print
rate was 3-5 pages /min.
8) Few of the built-in characters in some of the fonts appear "defective"
with visible defects (they look good though from a distance).
But that's a minor problem.
It is absolutely true that TI tries to do their best with the OMNILASERS
(at least as far as they can see what "best" is). They do stand behind their
products and they are committed to fix most of the problems.
As a conclusion, if the printer is build by TI to finally meet all the specs
that it was advertised for then it will sure be a good buy.
CCZ
System Manager