Crisper print, lower cost - comparison of six 600-dpi laser printers - Hardware Review - Evaluation

Home Office Computing, Oct, 1995 by Joey Latimer

So you thought your print problems were a thing of the past when you moved up to laser. Well, look again. Those handouts you've been printing lately include more graphics and finicky typefaces. Your 300dpi laser printer makes them look sharper than your old ink-jet or dot-matrix printer ever could. But what once looked exceptional now seems ordinary. It's time for you to move up to 600dpi.

The main benefits of 600dpi laser printers are their vastly improved quality for graphic images and text (especially on small point size fonts). You'll also find dramatically improved speed over the 300dpi printers of just two years ago. The slowest system we tested cranked out four pages per minute (ppm). With the printers we review here, you also get small footprints that give you back desk real estate and include energy-saving features.

Prices now hover where 300dpi laser printers were 18 months ago, and key features keep being improved. Although ink-jet prices are falling as quickly as their quality is improving (with several 600dpi models available), they're still no match for the quality of a laser. Consider them if you need color output, but make a 600dpi laser your next black-and-white purchase if you create lots of brochures, fliers, or other graphics-heavy documents.

What to Look For Each of the printers we tested came with 2MB of RAM. In the past, you would have needed at least 4MB, with 6MB preferable, to handle graphics jobs--especially for full-page 600dpi output. To keep the need for RAM down, however, each of these printers has some form of data compression to squeeze the most out of 2MB. This trick seems to work well. During our tests, we printed letters, spreadsheets, newsletters, posters, and other common graphics jobs, and we never had a lack of memory cause us problems.

Except for the Okidata, the printers here also include some form of resolution improvement technology (called edge enhancement) to eliminate rough edges when you scale graphics and text to larger sizes. And to save energy, each unit powers down when not in use after a certain amount of time. You'll have to wait a little (less than a minute) for the printer to warm up, but your printer will last longer, your electric bill will be lower, and you won't have to listen to an annoying fan. Each printer includes a wide variety of fonts (although some cost extra) so you can start printing right away--without making a trip back to the computer store.

One of the most important things to consider when choosing a laser printer is the software it uses to render a page for printing. Called page description language (PDL), it defines how a printer handles graphics and fonts and relays the information from the computer to the printer. The most commonly used PDL by professional printers and service bureaus is Adobe's Postscript. Today, however, fewer printers for the office are equipped with Postscript 2, which includes such features as data compression, color management, and faster printing speeds.

Instead, the most common PDL used in offices is Hewlett-Packard's Printer Control Language, or PCL. The latest version, called PCL5e, has begun to rival Postscript in its ability to scale type and mix it with graphics. In our tests, however, we quickly noticed that Postscript handled complex text and graphics mixtures more speedily than PCL. With the exception of the Apple LaserWriter 4/600 PS Postscript Level 2 printer, all the printers we tested here provide PCL5 or PCL5e. The Texas Instruments microLaser 600 comes with both PostScript 2 and PCL5, but only Brother's HL-660 continues to offer an upgrade to Postscript 2.

The NEC and Brother printers we reviewed bring the transfer of data from the computer to the printer one step closer by using optimized drivers to send data directly from Windows to the printer, thus bypassing the translation stage to PCL. The Brother HL-660 its own data compression technology do this; the NEC uses Windows GDI technology. The result was that printing times from Windows were faster than all the other printers. In one case, the NEC (rated at six pages per minute) printed a complex graphics picture more than an hour faster than the 4ppm Epson we tested.

To compare the output of the printers, we looked at printing speed, general appearance (with special emphasis on smooth edges and the fluidity of gray shading), and accuracy (how closely the page matches the screen). We were generally pleased with the output of all these printers, with a few exceptions, and found some merit in each of them. Note that market leader Hewlett-Packard could not get us its update to the venerable 600dpi Laserjet 4P in time for this review. Expect a review of the Laserjet 5P in a future issue.

Apple LaserWriter 4/600 PS

Rating:***

MAC

Apple's loyal customers have had to wait for a bargain 600dpi laser printer. Now they just have to wait for the text output. The LaserWriter 4/600 PS, a Postscript Level 2 printer rated at 4ppm, was among the slowest printers we tested for printing straight text but among the fastest for either graphics or text mixed with graphics. In fact, it completed many graphics-based tests faster than the 5ppm Texas Instruments microLaser 600.