Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!apple!bloom-beacon!athena.mit.edu!captkidd
From: captkidd@athena.mit.edu (Ivan Cavero Belaunde)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: MacWorld
Keywords: Printers
Message-ID: <13822@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Date: 25 Aug 89 19:07:36 GMT
References: <13546@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> <501@mit-amt.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> <5061@mnetor.UUCP>
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: captkidd@athena.mit.edu (Ivan Cavero Belaunde)
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lines: 24

In article <5061@mnetor.UUCP> frank@mnetor.UUCP (Frank Kolnick) writes:
>I'm still waiting for 400dpi (or greater) PostScript-driven laser printers.
>Any news on that front?

Well, in the MacWorld Expo report I posted, I mentioned a company called
LaserMAX, which was displaying a number of new products.  First, it had
3 Nubus boards which attach to a LaserWriter (any model) and drives the
engine directly, providing 600x300 dpi resolution and *much* faster
performance.  The 3 models vary in the amount of on-board memory (2M, 4M,
and 6M), which then affects processing speed.  It basically had an optimized
Postscript-compatible Raster Image Processor (RIP) on the board, and the
more memory it has to work with, the faster it goes.  The boards were fairly
steep, but if you need it, it's there.  The other product was the big one,
though.  They had a laser printer (they called it a typesetter, because of
the printout quality and speed) with an optimized RIP much like the one
on the boards which had 1000x400 dpi output resolution and ~15 sec/page for
*very* complicated printouts (multiple tiff files and stuff).  I am not
positive about this, but I think it was also connected through the Nubus
(for high-speed data transfer, possibly).  The price was reasonable for
the level of performance it provided: $7999.

-Ivan

Internet: captkidd@athena.mit.edu