hjstein@sizzlean.berkeley.edu (Harvey J. Stein) (03/25/91)
I have an Okilaser 400, and I also borrowed one before buying my own. I've printed about 3000 pages through them (about 2000 through a borrowed one and 1000 through mine). They work well - the output is exceedingly crisp and precise. By precise, I mean that the horizontal dots per inch is exactly right, and vertically, it's only off by about 1mm over 11". That is to say, if one were to try printing a square of size 7" by 10" by printing 2100 dots by 3000 dots (since it is supposed to be 300 dpi), the square's width would be exatly 7", and the height would be about 10.05". Most laser printers that I've seen distort the output quite a bit more. I suppose that this is because Okidata uses an LED array instead of a laser scanning back and forth. I'd be extremely satisfied with it (especially since it retails for about $600), if it wasn't for one problem and one bug. First the problem. When you turn on an Okilaser, the front panel displays 'WARMING UP' for about a minute, before displaying 'ON-LINE' and becoming ready to print. After about a month of use, mine started to only display 'WARMING UP', and never go on-line. It would do this intermittently. Some times it would display 'RAM CHECK ERROR' instead. According to the manual, one should turn it off and try again, and if this persists, to bring it in for servicing. Anyway, I finally brought it in for service, and I was very pleased that they immediately shipped it off to Okidata (at no expense to me), and in about a week, I got my printer back. It seemed to work fine, except now (after another month of use) I'm experiencing the same problem. I'm planning on bringing it back in and requesting a new one. Now for the bug. The first job that's printed to the printer after removing and reinserting the paper tray has a margin problem. The problem is that the second and all successive sheets of that one job print about 1/2" lower on the page than they should. The first page prints fine. Only the first job is affected. My work-around is to print the first job in 2 parts, the first page and the remaining pages. This is when using TeX (specifically, em-TeX). It doesn't happen when printing plain text. Both Okilasers exhibited the same behavior on my computer (a '286 box with MS-DOS), and one of them does the same thing on an Atari too, so I believe it's an emulation problem. Unfortunately, no one (not 1-800-OKI-DATA, nor the store at which I bought the printer) has been helpful with this problem. They start babbling about what page length setting I'm using, which is clearly nonsense. So, I'd be curious to hear if anyone else has experienced either of these problems. Harvey Stein hjstein@math.berkeley.edu