HP laser printer moves

Press, 17 March 1987, Page 20

HP laser printer moves

By

NEIL BIRSS

Hewlett-Packard has positioned itself strongly in the desktop-publishing market with a group of new products.

It has announced the HP Laser Jet Series 11, a laser printer with a number of enhancements, but for under $6OOO before GST. This is cheaper than the original HP laser printers (though these now have been reduced in price).

The new printer is expandable with a series of plug-in memory capsules. It can be expanded to 4Mb of memory, but IMb memory expansion gives it 300-dots-per-inch capability across a full A 4 graphics page. This, and the coming DDL board which will slot into an AT compatible microcomputer and allow graphics manipulation which will at least match that on the Apple Laser Writer, pushes the Hewlett-Packard into a strong position in the burgeoning desktop publishing market. The Laser Jet II comes with 512 K of resident memory. It is more compact than the earlier models. Based on Canon’s LBPSX printer engine, the Laser Jet II has two fontcartridge slots, and prints on a much wider variety of paper types. It can also have a 200-sheet input bin and a 100-page output bin.

HP has looked at user friendliness, and put more of the controls on a panel on the front of the machine. This allows the user to select from a number of options, including primary fonts, serial and parallel interfaces with the driving microcomputer, the number of copies, and special symbol sets.

The printer has a single slot for memory expansion, and the user can choose from IMb, 2Mb and 4Mb expansion modules. The high memory options allow complex electronic forms, such as letterheads and forms, page borders and logs, to be sent to the printer from the computer. The printer has six resident fonts: landscape and verticle forms of traditional typewriter faces. More than 20 font cartridges, whose price has just been revised by HP, are available, and users can download "soft fonts” from disk to the machine. Up to 32 disk fonts can be downloaded, and up to 16 different ones used on a page. Hewlett - Packard’s

earlier laser printers, HP Laser Jet and HP Laser Jet Plus, will be marketed for another six months.

An important tool to all desktop publishers will be a scanner. This machine allows the computer to absorb line (black and white) illustrations for use in page make-up.

HP’s Scan Jet will also handle photographs, in a way that is less satisfactory than the screen reproduction used by traditional printers, but passable for some uses.

The machine uses a process HP calls dithering, in which a pattern of identically sized dots is varied to represent different levels of grey. The scanner, which requires a board to be installed in a host microcomputer, allows image enlargement and reduction between 12 per cent and 1578 per cent of the original size.

The scanner can distinguish between 16 levels of grey.

A third new product announced by HewlettPackard makes desktop publishing an alternative to printing for standard forms for larger uses. The HP 2000 will be of use to companies with PC or minicomputer networks. Instead of having preprinted forms, workstation users will be able to use the machine's enhanced internal memory and 32 resident fonts to summon up resident form formats and have them printed out by the machine, which is said to have a monthly print volume of 70,000 sheets at a cost of 2c a page. Together, the HP products give a strong lift to the MS DOS arm of desktop publishing. HP has the lead in MS DOS software compatible with its laser printers, and the new machines, with the DDL hoards due out within a month or two, give it an edge on Apple in printers.