From: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!info-vax Newsgroups: fa.info-vax Title: Re: inexpensive laser printers & misinformation Article-I.D.: ucbvax.219 Posted: Sat Dec 4 17:01:41 1982 Received: Sun Dec 5 09:24:36 1982 >From g.Ryland@SU-SCORE Sat Dec 4 16:42:01 1982 Mail-From: ARPANET host SANDIA rcvd at 29-Nov-82 1108-PST Mail-From: ARPANET site SU-SCORE rcvd at 29-Nov-82 1203-MST To: info-vax@SANDIA, info-printers@MIT-MC, mark.umcp-cs@UDEL-RELAY Remailed-Date: 4 Dec 1982 1047-PST Remailed-From: the tty of Geoffrey S. Goodfellow Remailed-To: Info-VAX@SRI-CSL: ; Brian Reid's recent missive concerning laser printers was mostly quite informative, but on the issue of the IMAGEN vs. Symbolics printing systems, he is rather misinformed and, I think it is fair to say, blatantly vitriolic. NB: I work for IMAGEN, but I'll try to keep my remarks objective. The Symbolics Canon-based printer is NOT based on the LM-1 or LM-2 or any such beast; if it were, it would cost about $125K! It has a custom 68000 board stuck inside the Canon. Brian says the Symbolics system has "extremely good software support for various printing formats, including those used by TRoff, TeX and Scribe." (this is in contrast to the IMAGEN printer, he claims, which supports TRoff output "at substantially degraded quality.") Sorry, Brian, both Symbolics and IMAGEN support TRoff in exactly the same way, with exactly the same quality of output: TRoff's CAT output is converted to the native language of the printer in question. Further, Scribe DOES NOT support the Symbolics printer. It may in a few months, but check with Unilogic for details. Scribe DOES support the IMAGEN printer, and since Unilogic has an IMAGEN printer, it will probably always have rather good support for it. Brian claims the Symbolics printer can "use Chaosnet or Ethernet links at additional cost." Ignoring the confusion of hardware vs software protocols, that is false at the current time. Symbolics is planning (I've heard) to offer 10mb Ethernet hardware with Chaosnet protocols (just fine if you have Lisp machines) sometime in first quarter '83. Let me point out that IMAGEN will offer 10mb Ethernet hardware, with both Chaosnet and TCP/IP software, within 3 months (1 March 82). Back to the "substantially degraded quality" of output from the IMAGEN printer. Besides being false, it will get more false, as IMAGEN will be offering, as part of the first commercial release of the software in its printer, a native CAT emulation mode to avoid the host overhead of the conversion from CAT to native language. Brian's claim that the firmware is extremely flakey, requiring a reset every 4 jobs he prints, can only come from some extreme confusion about something. IMAGEN has 70+ systems in the field, and none of them have complained about such a situation (neither has Brian complained to us directly, so that we might clear up any problems which he might have). Also note that Stanford has 17 systems, all of them bought at 10% list price, and that part of IMAGEN's agreement with Stanford is that they would maintain them themselves; thus, Brian's claim that he can't get any support out of IMAGEN is puzzling. If you are still convinced by Brian's misleading statements, try contacting some of IMAGEN's customers. Most of them are extremely happy (modulo the inherent problems with the LBP-10, which, as a wet process printer, has drawbacks). --Chris Ryland -------