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From: phr@mit-hermes.AI.MIT.EDU (Paul Rubin)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: News Announcement!!! ($1500 laser printer)
Message-ID: <2777@mit-hermes.AI.MIT.EDU>
Date: Sat, 10-Jan-87 02:03:51 EST
Article-I.D.: mit-herm.2777
Posted: Sat Jan 10 02:03:51 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 10-Jan-87 06:22:16 EST
References: <870109212520.0000099C.AONM.MA@UMass>
Reply-To: phr@hermes.UUCP (Paul Rubin)
Organization: The MIT AI Lab, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 26
Summary: controller absence a blessing?

In article <870109212520.0000099C.AONM.MA@UMass> Flash@UMass.BITNET (Rick Flashman) writes:
>o   Also announced was a new laser printer. ($1500) It has no controller
>    and is software driven from the ST. "prototype" so prepare to wait
>    for this one. Another mention seems to say that you need a 2 meg
>    ST to be able to run it. Hmmm, considering that laser printers
>    WITH a controller sell for $1,895 and Apple is coming out with a
>    "mini" printer for $2,000 with a controller. I think Atari might
>    either lower the price a bit, or add a controller.

At the moment I don't know of any inexpensive laser printers that let you
load a full page bitmap at full resolution.  You need a megabyte of memory
to do this, and most of the cheap printers around (HP LJ+, etc.) come
with 1/2 a megabyte.  At current DRAM prices this seems like marketroid-
induced insanity, but who knows why they do it.  In any case, I welcome
a printer that doesn't think it knows better than I do what I want to
print on the page.  (Has anyone used the Tall Trees JLASER card?  This
is a board that plugs into a PC backplane and drives the LBP-CX video
interface directly.  I gather you have to lobotomize your printer by
cutting a few wires (bypassing the controller) in order to use it.)

While we're on the subject, does anyone know a cheap (<$500) dot matrix
printer with good dot resolution (e.g. 24 pin head) that lets you print
full resolution graphics at full speed?  The NEC Pinwriter P6 is a
possibility if you can stuff bits into the parallel port fast enough.
Has anyone seen this done?  I want to have a cheap and dirty way of
printing .dvi (TeX output) files.