NEC'S FIRST ENTRY into the world of hybrid color printers, the SuperScript Color 3000M, is both versatile and inexpensive. The Color 3000M gives you three printing modes -- dye-sublimation, regular thermal-wax, and variable-dot thermal-wax. You switch among printing modes by changing paper and the printer's ribbon.
The Color 3000M is a QuickDraw printer, so your Mac has to handle all the processing chores, which makes printing quite slow. But if all you need is good-quality color printing at a low price and you don't need PostScript, the Color 3000M fills the bill.
Easy Setup
Setting up the Color 3000M took less than ten minutes. You install the ribbon for the printing mode you want into a cassette, which you place in the printer. You clip the paper feeder onto the top of the printer, load the appropriate paper into the paper tray, connect the printer to a serial port, and install the printer driver.
Each of the three print technologies requires you to trade off print time and cost per page for output quality. Of the three technologies, regular thermal-wax printing is the fastest and cheapest but produces the least-attractive output. It's fine for business graphics such as Excel charts, but it doesn't work well with photographic images or graphics with subtle color gradations. On the other hand, it's the only technology that lets you use plain paper. The Color 3000M's engine speed for thermal-wax printing is about one page per minute, and printing a three-color page will cost you about 55cents.
By using a fine dithering pattern with varying dot sizes, variable-dot thermal-wax printing gives you much-better-looking results than regular thermal-wax printing. It requires special thermal-transfer paper, however, which makes it somewhat more expensive than regular thermal-wax printing. The Color 3000M's engine speed for variable-dot printing is about ten minutes a page, and each color page costs about 80cents in paper and consumables.
Dye-sublimation printing provides the best quality, but it also has the highest cost per page -- about $3 -- for its special paper and consumables. As with variable-dot printing, the engine is rated to print one page in about ten minutes.
Protracted Printing
Engine-speed ratings are a poor indicator of how long it actually takes to produce a printed page with the Color 3000M. Even with a Power Mac 8100/100 with 136 MB of RAM, we often encountered print times longer than half an hour when we printed a color page. Most of this time was for processing the data on the Mac. Text and QuickDraw-based vector graphics such as charts printed faster, but speed is definitely not this printer's forte. A direct-export plug-in that lets Photoshop communicate directly with the printer cuts times almost in half. But even so, printing a full-page 300-dpi color image from Photoshop through this plug-in took a little more than 25 minutes, 24 of which tied up our Mac with processing duties.
The Color 3000M gives you some control over halftones, but color matching was a chore. The print driver lets you adjust halftone settings for thermal-wax printing and control ink intensity and lightness for variable-dot and dye-sublimation. However, there's no way to tweak the built-in color-matching settings in the driver. Ironically, we obtained better screen-to-print color matching with variable-dot printing than with dye-sublimation. We hope NEC will implement ColorSync color matching in a future version of the driver, since it would make color matching much simpler.
The Color 3000M can print on transparencies as well as on paper, but only in the thermal-wax and variable-dot modes. Even though using the variable-dot mode takes longer, transparencies created in it look much better than those printed in thermal-wax mode. Nonetheless, we were disappointed that you can't create dye-sublimation transparencies on the Color 3000M.
The documentation for the Color 3000M is adequate, but we would have liked it to include some discussion about which printing resolution works best with which technology. By trial and error, we determined that there's little reason to use any resolution higher than 200 dpi for variable-dot printing or any setting higher than 150 dpi for thermal-wax printing. Using the printer's highest resolution -- 300 dpi -- makes sense only for dye-sublimation printing.
The Bottom Line
For those who aren't in a hurry and don't need PostScript output, the Color 3000M will provide excellent color prints, and at a street price under $750, it won't break the bank. It was easy to install and use, and it didn't have any nasty tendencies to jam or to misfeed paper. If it had more-sophisticated color-matching features, it would be even better.
NEC SuperScript Color 3000M
Rating: Acceptable/Very Good (3.5 of 5 mice)
Price: $999 (list).
Pros: Inexpensive hardware. Uses any one of three color printing technologies. Easy to set up and use.
Cons: Slow. Relies on host Mac for processing. No PostScript support. Needs better color matching. Expensive consumables.
Company: NEC Technologies, Boxborough, MA; 800-632-4636 or 508-264-8000.
Dye-sub plus two modes of thermal-transfer printing make the SuperScript Color 3000M a versatile performer.
