Apple's low-end printers have never been much to write home about, but that may change soon. MacWEEK quotes sources at Apple saying that the company plans to introduce two new laser printers, the Personal LaserWriter SC and the Personal LaserWriter NT by mid-summer. Officially, though, Apple isn't admitting anything. The new lasers are expected to provide an attractive alternative to the Hewlett Packard LaserJet IIP, which retails for $1495 but can be found for under $1000. The Personal LaserWriter SC should retail for around $2100 while the Personal LaserWriter NT will cost about $3300.

It would seem that the LaserJet IIP is significantly cheaper than the Personal LaserWriter NT, but adding PostScript and its required extra memory as well as an AppleTalk port to the IIP raises its price significantly. In addition, HP has yet to ship its recently-announced PostScript cartridge. Not to be outdone by HP, Apple will include LaserJet emulation in the Personal LaserWriter NT.

The Personal LaserWriter SC will replace the current LaserWriter II SC, but will suffer from the same problems in printing. To obtain non-jaggy text from the LaserWriter II SC (and the new Personal LaserWriter SC), users must either use a font scaling utility like Adobe's ATM or QMS's Font Freedom or put up with storing fonts four times larger than those printed out. Of course, System 7.0's TrueType should also help, but the realistic release date has slipped to late 1990.

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