Low-cost lasers: power printing at bargain prices - Hardware Review - Apple's LaserWriter Select 310, DEC's DECLaser 1152, Epson America Inc's ActionLaser 1500, HP's LaserJet 4L and LaserJet IIIP, Panasonic's KX-P4430, Star Micronics' LS-5 EX, Texas s Instruments' microWriter PS 23 - Evaluation

Home Office Computing, Sept, 1993 by Henry F. Beechhold

Laser Printers Entice With Premium-Quality Output, Speed, And, Now, Low Prices

Unless you love the sizzling sound of a dot-matrix printer or need to print multipart forms, you've run out of excuses for not buying a laser printer: Prices have fallen to the basement. Today you can pick up a 4-, 5-, or 6-ppm (page per minute) laser for under $1,000.

You don't have to make big trade-offs for low prices, either. Bargain lasers lag behind their more expensive 8- or 10ppm siblings mainly in print speed, but they're still faster than most impact printers. Put most bargain laser pages alongside a premium laser page, and you probably won't notice much difference except, perhaps, with respect to certain text and graphics subtleties. For example, some more costly units may support 600by-600-dpi resolution or build in technology to sharpen hailtones, or both.

But low-cost lasers do take some action to improve the quality of their standard 300-dpi output--the resolutionenhancement technologies offered by most of the products in this review polish the "jaggies" of curves and diagonals to create smoother text and line art. For producing formal correspondence, newsletters, or almost anything else, a low-cost laser will do the job well. Just about the only reason you wouldn't want one of these printers is if you're planning to produce camera-ready work for high-quality production printing, or if you need serious speed.

The eight printers in this review are all priced under $1,000 on the street. Most of these products--with the exception of Hewlett-Packard's LaserJet IIIP--are new to the market within the last 12 to 18 months. We tested the printers both for the quality of their text and image output and for their speed. Our review process also turned up a variety of productivityboosting extras in these products, such as automatic port and emulation switching.

FONTS FOR THE MASSES

All of these printers include a selection of built-in fonts. A font is an organized collection of characters in a certain style of a particular typeface: Times Roman Bold or Courier Italic, for example. Almost all of the printers in this review speak one version or another of Hewlett-Packard's PCL (Printer Control Language). Four support PCL 5 and generally include the expected 14 bitmapped, or fixed-size, fonts and eight scalable fonts, which are adjustable in size. The HP LaserJet 4L supports Enhanced PCL 5 and includes 26 scalable fonts.

Three of the printers include PostScript, previously found only in more expensive offerings. (The number of built-in, scalable PostScript fonts varies from printer to printer.) That's a plus if you want a printer for proof work before sending files to a professional image-setting service--where PostScript is the lingua franca--for output to higher resolution devices. Additionally, with a PostScript printer, you can readily take advantage of PostScript font cartridges and the multitude of soft (downloadable) typefaces in the Adobe Type Library. (Even if your printer does not build in PostScript, you can use PostScript Type 1 fonts under Windows if you have a utility Such as the $99 Adobe Type Manager.)

As much as PostScript has to offer, you don't necessarily need it to create ooh- and ahhh-inspiring output. You can do just fine with the 15 downloadable TrueType fonts that come standard with Windows or the nine you get with the Mac System 7 operating system. If you want more TrueType fonts, you can turn to Bitstream Inc. ([800] 522-3668), the Agfa Division of Miles Inc. ([800] 4248973), SWFTE International ([800] 2379383), and a host of others.

As a rule, a graphics-intensive printout in PostScript mode takes a fair bit longer than a similar printout using PCL. Even in PCL mode, multifont text pages take longer than single-font text pages, as do pages with a lot of formatting diversity. Almost all the printers we tested came close to their claimed page-per-minute specifications when printing a text-intensive test document with few formatting or font changes.

THE MEDIA AND THE METHODS

The multipurpose paper trays that come standard on most of these printers allow you to stockpile the paper size of your choice: executive, letter, or legal, for example. The standard automatic paper cassette on the TI microWriter PS 23, however, can't accommodate legal-size sheets. The Star Micronics LS-5 EX adds a 50-sheet multipurpose paper tray in addition to its 250-sheet letter-size paper cassette. None jammed up while processing paper, envelopes, or labels, and all allowed face-up or face-down paper ejection.

All of the printers come with at least IMB of RAM. With almost all of them, you'll probably want to get a minimum of 2MB, enough for most printing jobs. But remember that heavy graphics printing can slurp up large chunks of memory.

Just one year ago, it was rare to find so many laser printers selling for so little money. The trend promises to continue: By the time you read this, other companies-- such as Okidata, Sharp, and Brother--will have delivered new low-cost lasers while prices for some older, still viable products-such as the IBM Laserprinter 4029-6 and the C. Itoh ProWriter CI-4 will have also come down to under $1,000 on the street. One thing is eminently clear: