leue@galen.crd.ge.com (Bill Leue) (03/16/91)
I was recently lucky enough to be able to play with a new StyleWriter for an hour or so. Here are my early impressions. 1. Size: this thing is TINY! Without the bundled sheet feeder, it's about the size of a large college textbook -- about 8" high by 10" wide by 2" deep. It stands on the narrow end, and you pull out a little thingy that sits flat on the desk and acts as a stop for paper coming out of the machine. With the sheet feeder attached, its depth more or less triples, and it also gets taller, but most of the height is the paper itself sticking up. 2. It's QUIET, but you already knew that, since it's an ink-jet. 3. The print quality is very good indeed; in some respects better than LaserWriter quality. The resolution is 360dpi, better than standard laser printers. That resolution shows up when you print hairlines and to a certain extent in the crispness of characters. 4-point Garamond is quite readable. (see below). The only cases where I could see deviations from laser printer quality were when fill patterns were used: you can see the minor horizontal and vertical excursions from perfect alignment of each "swatch" of printing made by a pass of the print head. This is the same effect you get on a dot-matrix printer, but the errors are much smaller. The 50% grey fill pattern shows the effect the worst -- it is just barely visible with other fills. I judged the "blackness" to be about the same as "average" laser printing black -- not coal-black but better than any dot-matrix printer. 4. The ink cartirdge supplied comes with non-waterproof ink. I don't know whether waterproof ink is available. 5. It seems to work just fine with ATM 2.0. It comes bundled with the TrueType INIT, but I didn't try that. 6. It's (predictably) slow - about 2 minutes for a complete page of text. 7. The margins are fixed at about 1/4" on all 4 sides on standard 8.5 x 11" paper. (8.5 x 14" is also supported) There's no way to change the margins -- in fact, the print driver dialogs contain no options at all -- even "draft" mode is dimmed out, although the printer specs mention that it does have an internal draft mode. This is no big loss, because draft mode is almost as slow as "Best". 8. It comes with a serial interface only, and the cable is INCLUDED with the printer! (Nice going, Apple). It fits the standard mini-8 printer port. 9. It has TWO manual feed slots -- one in the front for normal paper that forces sheets through a "U" path, and one at the back with a "straight through" feed path for stiffer material. The spec sheets mentions that you ought to use a good quality rag bond, but I got good results on ordinary copier bond. I did not get a chance to try label stock or heavy stock, but the spec says that they will work ok. Altogether, I think it's a really nice printer. I was tempted to order one. The suggested retail price is identical to the ImageWriter II -- $595, which means that the "street" price will fall to $500 or less after quantities get ramped up. I expect that this machine will become the standard printer for personal use overnight. This printer, by the way, completes my "dream portable setup" -- an LC with a DynaMac LCD screen and on of these printers (minus the sheet feeder) would make a fantastic "luggable" system for use on the road -- the only thing else you need is an internal modem. -Bill Leue leue@crd.ge.com
mmcnew@pro-odyssey.cts.com (Monty McNew) (03/17/91)
In-Reply-To: message from leue@galen.crd.ge.com Anyone know if mail order houses are carrying the Stylewriter yet? I went to my local dealer yesterday and was told they are *major* backordered and they were taking names only. ---- ProLine: mmcnew@pro-odyssey Monty S. McNew Internet: mmcnew@pro-odyssey.cts.com @ Pro-Odyssey UUCP: crash!pro-odyssey!mmcnew 707/437-4734 ARPA: crash!pro-odyssey!mmcnew@nosc.mil Fairfield, CA