Re: Postscript printers
When I researched all this several years ago, I found it's not HP's
development, it's a PostScript interpreter/raster image processor (RIP)
that's OEMed from a company that used to be named Xionics and appears to now
be named Oak Technology Products (www.oaktech.com). On their web site you
can see they sell this type of technology and have suggestive reference to
the HP product line, but neither they nor HP come right out and say it.
In the publishing world there are a variety of PostScript RIPs but in the
consumer electronics market the only ones that seem popular are Adobe and
Xionics (or now Oak, apparently).
In my experience working at a typesetting company, we had generally better
experience with the Xionics RIP than the Adobe. True, compatibility is an
issue but unless you are doing truly funky things with fonts (like making
your own) or need strict adherence to Adobe specifications for things like
screening, you'll not be at much risk. In particular, performance and
throughput were better in the QMS printers we loved dearly.
As far as using ghostscript to RIP PostScript to raster PCL, that's going to
be a waste of your computer's CPU and just increase the amount of data that
has to be delivered to the printer. PostScript is extremely efficient and
you're better off, if you want to print PostScript, to let the printer do
the work. Note I'm not saying anything about cost/benefit here. I prefer
PostScript because of its robustness. That's an opinion, others may prefer
PCL on the same merit, but I'm not aiming to start a flame war on that
topic.
> I remember reading that in the past 2-3 years, HP switched from true
> Adobe Postscript to an inhouse Postscript emulation. I have an HP
> Laserjet 4MPlus which has a Postscript SIMM that has Adobe Postscript
> trademarks printed right on it (and the manual states that it's
> Postscript is licensed from Adobe) and that's from maybe 4 years ago.
>
> All Apple Laser Printers are (or at least used to be) Postscript and I
> would imagine that they might still use true Adobe Postscript.
> However, the truth is that HP has so much of the laser market, I'd be
> quite surprised if their Postscript emulation was not extremely
> competitive with Adobe's own product, but then again, stranger things
> have happened.
>
> HTH,
>
> Daniel
>
>
> Dave wrote:
> > It seems like its getting hard to find a true Postscript printer -
> > either Adobe has gotten too expensive for the manufacturers to license
> > it, or the consumer market has given up on Postscript. The last
> > Postscript printer I bought was an expensive Tektronix.
> > - Dave Felt
> >
> > S.Salman Ahmed wrote:
> > > >>>>> "BN" == Bob Nielsen <nielsen@oz.net> writes:
> > > BN> It depends on what you mean by "true postscript". Yes, the
> > > BN> 2100M is a PostScript printer, but uses a HP-developed
emulation
> > > BN> rather than Adobe firmware.
> > > BN>
> > >
> > > And a printer that uses Adobe firmware would likely be more expensive
> > > than one that uses some type of emulation ?
> > > Salman Ahmed
> > > ssahmed AT pathcom DOT com
>
>
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