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

There's never been a better time to get more printing power for your money.

Apple LaserWriter Select 310 Rating: ** 1/2

With an eight-pin Macintosh serial port and a parallel port, the 5-ppm Apple LaserWriter Select 310 serves the Mac and DOS worlds (specifically Windows). The printer has the attraction of simplicity but some drawbacks.

The printer supports PostScript only. Although it printed out a test TIFF photographic image at high quality, it took minutes in comparison with the 30-to-40second print time for most of the other printers set to PCL mode. (The Apple product's speed for this task is, however, about equal to what you'll get out of the TI microWriter PS 23 in its PostScript mode.) Text speed was about par for the course, and the 300-dpi text output is quite good, despite the lack of printenhancement technology.

This printer has no direct means of control beyond that of turning on the power. Apple's philosophy is that most people care more about good quality printing and plug-and-play performance at a reasonable cost--about $975 on the street. The only external clues to what's going on are on/print, paper jam, and paper out LEDs. In Windows and on the Mac, the printer setup dialog boxes effectively constitute the control panel. This differs from the only other printer reviewed here with no control panel display, the HP LaserJet 4L, because the 4L includes a single button control and HP's Explorer software for more extensive configuration changes and test prints. There is no utility to tickle the LaserWriter Select 310 into producing status, font, and other test sheets or to save different configurations for different applications.

Documentation was minimal, and the printer ships with only 13 scalable fonts and no cartridge slots for adding more. If you need PostScript, other offerings reviewed here may prove better values.

DECLaser 1152

Rating: ** 1/2

At $1,000 list (figure 20 percent off on the street), the DECLaser 1152 is one of the least-expensive PostScript (and PCL 4) printers on the market. In fact, it was the only printer in this review to include Adobe PostScript Level 2.

Crisp text and rich halftone images distinguish this 300-dpi unit. But in both PostScript and PCL modes, the 4-ppm DECLaser was rather slow in printing text pages from a word processor, a lone photographic image, or simple desktoppublished pages with four fonts and a single TIFF graphic.

The printer has serial, parallel, and AppleTalk ports, but the vendor doesn't recommend using the serial port and AppleTalk port simultaneously. With two computers hooked up, though, the printer can automatically sense which port is in use. Front panel controls are well designed, but the standard paper tray handles only 70 pages. Most people will want to add the bottom 250-page cassette option. You can also expand upon the 17 internal PostScript fonts with optional font cartridges.

The unit takes up more acreage than its small dimensions might indicate, because input and output paper trays extend several inches to one side. The first printing of the documentation was poorly organized, with low-quality photographs. But since the eventual printout quality is solid, the DECLaser 1152 can be an acceptable choice for PostScript Level 2 on a budget.