kusumoto@chsun1.uchicago.edu (Bob Kusumoto) (10/14/90)
Argh! We finally got the Adobe Postscript cartridge working on our laserjet II
and it seems to be working out ok.
First, let's take a minor breakdown of cost: (street prices)
Laserjet II $900 Laserjet III $1350
Adobe PS cart. $300 HP PS cart. $ 450
HP 4MB board $950 2 HP 2MB boards $ 700
------ ------
$2150 $2500
your milage may vary. We try and put at least 4MB into any of our laserjet
printers but you can probably live with 2MB and still get by. Not all our
HP printers do postscript, but we still stick the memory in there (less
hassles with those complex graphs and charts).
The new Postscript cartridge works great. The StartUP page looks good,
tells you what fonts are in the machines (standard 35, plus more if you
have additional Adobe font cartridges in it), plus a review of the current
settings (usually things like serial or parallel port, and when we tested
in serial mode, it gave us the amount of RAM in the printer). Anyway, it
looks great, prints out great. We've only had a minor problem sending jobs
using TRANSCRIPT on the UNIX side and sending the job through kermit to a
Novell CAPTUREd printer which happens to be our lovely HP Laserjet II with
the Adobe Postscript cartridge (the glitch is that I got the thing to work
but someone who tried it couldn't get it to work, got me, I'm still looking
into it). From the PC side on our Novell Netware 286 v2.15c (adv sft),
things printed to it work out great (we use Lotus Manuscript and WordPerfect
v5.1, both programs handle the PS great). There's also the Printer Control
Panel TSR that autoswitches between PS and PCL depending on what job is
sent to the printer. This freaked me out at first because the LCD on the
printer went into self test mode and switched to the normal HP mode for
a while then did another self test and went back into PS mode. All our
PC jobs have works swimmingly so I have no complaints (except for the
somewhat slow speed switching from PS to PCL and back). Still, when you
already have a Laserjet II with memory or go out and buy one with the
cartridge, it sure the hell beats the heck out of buying an Apple Laserwriter
IINTX.
Now if only HP put out a SCSI printer that can handle postscript...
Bob
Bob Kusumoto | Find the electric messiah!
Internet: kusumoto@chsun1.uchicago.edu | The AC/DC God!
Bitnet: kusumoto@chsun1.uchicago.bitnet | - My Life with the Thrill Kill
UUCP: ...!{oddjob,gargoyle}!chsun1!kusumoto | Kult, "Kooler than Jesus"woody@chinacat.Unicom.COM (Woody Baker @ Eagle Signal) (10/15/90)
So where do you get a Laserjet II for $900.00? After looking these options over, the QMS ps-410 Looks pretty good. The street price is about the same. It comes with 2 meg memory, 45 fonts, and a 68020 engine for $2794 retail, but is only a 4 ppm machine. Unless you are really cranking out lots of text, 4 ppm is not to bad with a 68020 driving it. Rarely is there an application that can drive Postscript at 6 ppm anyway. I don't think I've ever seen my 8 ppm printer do more than 6 ppm unless it is a copypage.. Cheers Woody
kusumoto@chsun1.uchicago.edu (Bob Kusumoto) (10/19/90)
woody@chinacat.Unicom.COM (Woody Baker @ Eagle Signal) writes: >So where do you get a Laserjet II for $900.00? After looking these >options over, the QMS ps-410 Looks pretty good. The street price is about >the same. It comes with 2 meg memory, 45 fonts, and a 68020 engine >for $2794 retail, but is only a 4 ppm machine. Unless you are really >cranking out lots of text, 4 ppm is not to bad with a 68020 driving it. >Rarely is there an application that can drive Postscript at 6 ppm >anyway. I don't think I've ever seen my 8 ppm printer do more than >6 ppm unless it is a copypage.. Well, it really depends whether your happy with the QMS personal or the HP printers. The major computer outlets around here are unloading their HP laserjet IIs for under $1000 for a while now (three months now?) so as a base for a postscript machine, its nice. Plus you get normal HP PCL3 for free to boot which isn't that bad really (other than being extremely slow switching between modes, about 1 minute for the HP or PS self test to run before going to the correct mode). Bob Bob Kusumoto | Find the electric messiah! Internet: kusumoto@chsun1.uchicago.edu | The AC/DC God! Bitnet: kusumoto@chsun1.uchicago.bitnet | - My Life with the Thrill Kill UUCP: ...!{oddjob,gargoyle}!chsun1!kusumoto | Kult, "Kooler than Jesus"