Re: Need advice on Postscript/PCL printer
Thanks a lot for replying,
I'll check out what equivalents/evolutions have the Brother HL-730 and
the HP LaserJet 6MP, I'll also investigate more on the Lexmark
warranty and characteristic... but frankly speaking I'm seriously
turning towards the 1200dpi Epson, crossed fingers for it not to break
(to soon) and for the Epson service to be correct.
Nicola
(Below I'm just thinking aloud, just in case anybody has anything to add.)
On Fri, Sep 29, 2000 at 04:25:46PM -0600, Hubert Chan wrote:
> Nicola Bernardelli <nbern@iname.com> writes:
[snip]
> > I guess a PCL-only printer would also do, maybe via Ghostscript as a
> > translator, but what would it miss compared to a Postscript printer?
>
> I don't think you'd miss much. Setting up a PCL printer is a bit
> more work (at least until I discovered the apsfilter package), but
> you should be able to print anything out on it. It may be slower,
> because (AFAIK - so don't quote me on this) Ghostscript would print
> each page as a large bitmap.
So Ghostscript (I'll check its docs and the ones of apsfilter) does
_not_ translate to PCL, I see, kind of gdi at last :-(
But it's not gdi, could it be worse, may that imply need of more RAM
on the printer?
> And complex pages will be processed by your CPU instead of the
> printer, which may cause a bit of problems on a high-load machine,
> but you probably don't have to worry about that for normal
> text/music work.
>
> I have a Brother HL-730, and I haven't had any problems with it. It
> took some digging before I found out the right configuration to make
> it print at 600dpi, though.
>
> A general warning about printers: some claim to have PCL support,
> but only support PCL through a Windows software driver. Some (like
> my HL-730) will support PCL4 in hardware, and some higher level of
> PCL through software, which is annoying because PCL4 only allows up
> to 300dpi.
<:-O I have discarded the really-entry-level laser 600dpi printers
for they are gdi-only (I don't have any idea of the state of the gdi
driver on Linux but of course a printer with a language would do
_much_ better), and their price is about 2/3 the price of the three
printers I mentioned, so there are chances that these ones have the
"emulations" builtin (why call them "emulation" and not just claim
they support those languages? ah, maybe that's just as the matrix
printer emulation, I mean just one among the possibilities, not
_the_one_), this is pretty sure for the Epson but _not_so_sure_ for
the other two, for which I couldn't get detailed specifications.
_And_ I was thinking about the "replacement" warranty... I'll ask
about it, but I guess that the contract does not say "... with a
brandnew one", so I think that this "option" may be better for an
office which is really using it heavily, I mean: if it gets replaced
with another not-new one there aren't many chances that it has been
working more than the replaced one. To me it would be frustrating to
have - say after a few months - a printer that has been working hard
for years and that already needed being repaired!
_And_ if Epson gives the Adobe Postscript 3 option with additional
16Mbytes RAM and with such a high price... chances are that the
Lexmark Postscript 2 could be a software emulation running on Mac and
"PC" with "PC"=Windows.
On Sat, Sep 30, 2000 at 10:36:09AM +0100, Oliver Elphick wrote:
> I have a Postscript printer, which is a HP LaserJet 6MP. I have been using it
> for 3 years with absolutely no trouble, or servicing! It will accept
> either Postscript or PCL, and produces excellent output. At the time I
> bought it it was as cheap as any other laser printer of similar
> capabilities.
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