neff@hp-vcd.HP.COM (Dave Neff) (03/15/91)
Since I, among others on the net, were recently speculating about the new Apple printers, and I have now had the opportunity to examine both the StyleWriter and Personal LaserWriter I have a few print times and (biased) observations. A fairly complex page was imaged and sent to the DeskWriter, Personal LaserWriter, and StyleWriter on a Mac LC. Total print time (including the time to image the page was: DeskWriter 1 minute 18 seconds Personal LaserWriter 1 minute 30 seconds StyleWriter 2 minutes 22 seconds In all three cases 57K baud serial IO was used. The DeskWriter also supports AppleTalk, but the StyleWriter and Personal LaserWriter only supports 57K baud serial. The page contained a mix of text and graphics. A few general observations, for both of Apple's new printers it seemed there were some cases of poor output quality that went away when we used ATM instead of True Type. Even with ATM there was a case where a rotated arrow character came out as just a "blob" (sort of looked like an arrow), but on the DeskWriter and LaserWriter II NTX it looked fine. A couple of observations about the StyleWriter. 1) It is basically a 1/2 page per minute printer (ignoring the time to image the page). The DeskWriter is basically a 2 page per minute printer (once again ignoring imaging time). Of course imaging time is significant -- especially on the low end Macs (on my FX the time to image a page of text is just a few seconds). 2) A grey shade did not come out anything like on the LaserWriter (new or PostScript) or the DeskWriter. What should have been grey was white with a few fairly large dots every 1/4" or so. Very strange really. Certainly it isn't a printer limitation, but something in the driver. 3) The StyleWriter always printed bi-directonally, but the mechanism was a bit sloppy. Vertical lines and solid areas of black were quite ragged. This was very surprising, but the StyleWriter does move paper and the print head very slow, and without the bi-directional printing it would be a 1/4 page per minute printer. The DeskWriter only prints bi-directonally when it will not lead to any degredation of output quality. 4) Although the printer is small and "clean" looking when folded up, when it is actually set up to print thats another matter. Personally, before buying one I would strongly recommend seeing the printer in action first. 5) In my opinion, print quality and waterfastness were comparable to the DeskWriter. Possibly the ink isn't quite as dark. I couldn't compare grey shades since for some reason the driver didn't really do a good job on the grey shade I saw. A couple of observations about the Personal LaserWriter. 1) Although it has a 4 page per minute laser engine, the time to image a page, and the time to transfer a page of data at 57K baud is the significant factor in its performance. I don't know why it was slower than the DeskWriter for the sample I saw. Possibly the driver is slower than the DeskWriter driver or the printer firmware doesn't handle the 57K baud graphics data as fast as the DeskWriter. Maybe there is some other reason. 2) This was a very attractive "clean" looking printer. Personally, I was much more impressed with the Personal LaserWriter than the StyleWriter. But don't buy it mainly because of speed :-). It does have the other advantages of laser printers (quality, cost per page, transparency capability, etc.). Dave (biased) Neff neff@hpvcfs1.HP.COM