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From: chuq%plaid@Sun.COM (Chuq Von Rospach)
Newsgroups: comp.text.desktop
Subject: Re: dumb vs. smart laser printers
Message-ID: <27648@sun.uucp>
Date: Thu, 10-Sep-87 13:22:55 EDT
Article-I.D.: sun.27648
Posted: Thu Sep 10 13:22:55 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 12-Sep-87 10:14:22 EDT
Sender: news@sun.uucp
Distribution: comp
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd. Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 37
Approved: desktop-request%plaid@sun.com

Essentially, what you get for your extra money in one of these "smarter"
laser printers is a slower laser printer.

The cheap, fast printers with the simple page description languages can
generally perform all the desktop publishing needs of a typical user.

Never in my experience have I ever wanted to, or heard of anybody wanting
to put a full page of high resolution graphics out to a laser printer for
desktop publishing purposes.

Desktop publishing is almost always mostly text.  My LaserJet+ with
512K of RAM has only run out of memory once.  That's when I wanted 15
high resolution screen images on the page at once.  In this rare case,
I just pasted up this one page.  I'm willing to do this to save
$3,000.  (Actually, the memory upgrade on the HP isn't that much)

The right software can produce superb looking documents on a plain old
LaserJet with 64K of memory.  It's all you need for letters, manuals,
charts tables etc.

Systems like Postscript are an admirable attempt at presenting a more
abstract interface, but they are currently not written well enough to
be fast and cheap.  I'll take typesetting at a full 6 pages per minute
on a cheap laserprinter over fancy type expansion features on a slower,
much more expensive printer any day.

Imagen never got DDL running quickly enough - it's one of the reasons
they dropped it.

Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd. - Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473
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Chuq Von Rospach	chuq@sun.COM		Delphi: CHUQ

We live and learn, but not the wiser grow -- John Pomfret (1667-1703)