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Laser.rvw
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1988-05-28
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DRIVING THE AST TURBOLASER/PS POSTSCRIPT LASER PRINTER
by Tim Strachan
[Ed: See next issue for a comparative review of a variety of laser
printers by a couple of Amiga users who are professionally involved in
desktop publishing.]
For about a year, I've coveted a postscript laser printer, the
high end of laser printers, and it finally arrived. This is an American
machine, imported and distributed by Imagineering in this country, and
it's a heavyweight in terms of performance and price. As a preamble,
I'll describe some of these terms, for those who aren't sure. Laser
printers come in many shapes, but there is a fundamental divide between
those which have the page description language Postscript (by Adobe),
and those which don't, such as the Hewlett-Packard and compatibles. The
hardware is essentially the same, but it's the software which makes
such a difference in price and quality of output. You can get HP lasers
for around $5000 or so, and they do a pretty good job of printing text
and limited graphics. They have minimal RAM installed, and to access a
variety of fonts, you need to download them to the printer, and you
need a printer driver on your system disk (standard on Amiga
Workbench).
Postscript, a programming language created by Adobe, and licensed
by them to manufacturers of laser printers, allows you much more
flexibility in desktop publishing. The AST has, for example, 35 fonts
sitting in its memory which can be accessed if you're using a DTP
program which is set up to use them, such as "Professional Page". You
simply choose the fonts and point sizes from within the program as
you're designing your page, and print. Likewise, graphics are handled
with greater ease, and the 3 Meg of RAM built into the printer provides
the large amount of space required to process the huge graphic
postscript files. These uses are standard, automatic uses of Postscript
but it is also a programming language, which means you can prepare a
postscript file manually with a text editor, or make changes to an
existing one, and then simply send the file through the serial port, as
follows:
> copy postscript.file to ser:
Further capabilities include full page manipulation - LaserScript,
which operates as the Postscript interface to Gold Disk's Pagesetter
program (the precursor to Professional Page), allows you to create all
kinds of effects, such as changing the size of a page and rotating it,
or even doing the same with a number of different pages on the same
output page.
In short, if you're serious about Desktop Publishing, and have the
money, you should use the power of Postscript.
THE FACTS ABOUT THE TURBOLASER
The printer is about the size of a serious photocopier, coloured
in about the same beige as the Amiga, and sports a paper tray which can
take up to 250 sheets. It has 3 Meg of RAM for processing documents,
and 1 Meg of ROM (Read Only Memory) for its internal fonts. The
manufacturer's blurb claims a speed of 8 pages per minute, but like
every other laser printer I've tried, this is rather misleading, since
it measures the speed of copies of the same page, once all the
processing has occurred. So if you're printing out a series of
different pages, each one will take up to a minute (or more with a page
which has a number of font changes and/or graphics). The laser engine
used is a Ricoh 4081, said to be one of the best available.
The manual also claims that either a serial cable or Centronics
parallel cable can be used to link it to the computer, but I tried two
different parallel cables without any joy - parallel would be better
than serial, since more information is going to the printer in parallel
than via a serial cable. No cables came with the printer, so one had to
be made up (for $35 from Pro-Digital in Sydney), and it worked fine,
being essentially a null modem cable which also works from an IBM
serial port.
It should be noted that the first machine that arrived had some
sort of obscure error flashing on the LED control panel. A call to
Imagineering resulted in instant action, and a second machine arrived
the next day by courier, which has worked without a single glitch.
The printer was tested with Pagesetter, Professional Page, and the
recently released Word Processor Excellence!, which can also handle
Postscript, which puts it into the semi-DTP category, and all three
spoke amicably to the printer. As I experienced with the Apple
Laserwriter Plus, which is comparable with the Turbolaser in most
specifications, it often happens that an attempt to print out 2 or more
pages in a document results in the printer giving up after the first
page. This may be due to an overload on the processing power of the
printer, and it is generally best to send pages to the printer one at a
time. Likewise, if you send it a page with a lot of different fonts
and/or some graphics, you may find that a couple of attempts are
necessary. In fact, serial transmission is slow, and not entirely
reliable, particularly with graphics. I'm told that the QMS 810 takes
input through the parallel port (57000 baud rate rather than 9600) and
interfaces well with the Amiga - see a review next issue.
Further fonts are available for the Turbolaser, beyond the
resident fonts which include: Helvetica, Times, Courier, Palatino, ITC
Avantgarde, ITC Bookman, ITC Zapf Chancery, ITC Zapf Dingbats,
Helvetica Condensed, and New Century Schoolbook. The engine should
print up to 600,000 sheets if properly maintained, and the printer can
be upgraded to a Turbolaser/XL, which provides the new Lasergraphics
language, Diablo 630 or Epson MX or FX printer emulation, and emulation
of some plotters, giving the capability of using the printer for output
from CAD packages.
AVAILABILITY : Good computer hardware vendors
PRICE : RRP $8750 (ex tax), $9918 (tax included)
DISTRIBUTOR : Imagineering Tel: (02) 6978666.
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