drstrip@intvax.UUCP (David R. Strip) (08/04/90)
I jsut received a mailing from HP offering JetScript boards for $495. Is this a good price? Is some change coming making these obsolete, or am I just paranoid? drstrip@cs.sandia.gov
woody@chinacat.Unicom.COM (Woody Baker @ Eagle Signal) (08/05/90)
In article <3592@intvax.UUCP>, drstrip@intvax.UUCP (David R. Strip) writes: > I jsut received a mailing from HP offering JetScript boards for > $495. Is this a good price? Is some change coming making these > obsolete, or am I just paranoid? > drstrip@cs.sandia.gov $495??? JetScript? This bugger has a list price of $2195 (now) from QMS. It is a coprocessor card for the PC, with 3 meg of ram, and a 16 mhz 68000 on board. It converts an HPLJ series II to postscript. At $495 you could almost salvage the ram, and be ahead of the game. A bit of history: QMS designed this board several years ago, and sold a BUNCH of them to HP. They were listed at $2795 by hp dealers, and there was something like a 35% discount or more depending on your volume level. This protected QMS dealers, who were also selling the board. I sold several. Since HP has dropped the attempt to upset the apple cart with DDL! QMS took care of that one 8=}.. and has embraced Postscript, coming out with their own Postscript cartridge, there is not a niche any more forr the product. The product is still in production and available from QMS but realy has no market niche now. for $495 for a PS CARTRIDGE, and about $400.00 for the needed memory to upgrade the series II so that it has enough memory to run PS, you have $895 or so vs $2195. The big diffrence, is that the JetScript board is LOTS faster. It only works with a PC/XT/AT class machine however. It allows you to have either the full functionality of your HP AND Postscript, without all the bugs inherent in Adobe's emulation of the HP laserjet. That is a whole other topic, of which there is a new interesting wrinkle. Apparently there is a rather serious bug in Version 47.C2 of the Adobe PS interpreter, when using the HP emulator. You can't print in column 80! I suspect that a <= 80 test got changed to a <80 or something similar, at anyrate, Adobe **apparently** told one OEM of theirs that they would fix it .....for $100,000.00 or or so I have been told. I have some files that were sent to me that document the problem. In a way, I don't blame Adobe, they don't have any interest in furthering the use of HPPCL, besides which they have other things like Postscript II that are higher on the priority list. On the other hand, I'd assume that they would want to give their OEM a bit more support. The jetscript doesnot have the problem, it uses the HP directly. Print to one port, get HP, print to another port get Postscript. I'd just go grab me a couple of these at this price, if I had a Series II laser. Just for the speed. Hey, who do we contact anyway? Cheers Woody Baker