🚀 go-pugleaf

Well, this is a bit overdue, but I just haven't had the time to enter this
until now.

I was at Type-X in New York two weeks ago, and saw some very interesting
products:
  1. Varityper's 600 DPI PostScript printer.
  2. Printware's 600 x 1200 DPI laser printer.
  3. Compugraphic's (actually Agfa's) 406 DPI PostScript printer.

The VT600 laser printer from Varityper lists for around $18K, and has the
PostScript language built into it.  It has 6 megabytes of memory (mostly
for the bitmap, around 4Mb), AppleTalk, Centronics, and RS-232 ports,
a 20 Meg disk, and Adobe's Atlas (68020) board.  The fonts families supported
are Courier, Symbol, and Varitimes (Varityper's own times family).  It is
rated at 10 pages/minute.

I saw samples of the output.  Certain things look quite good:  line art
is sharp, and italic fonts are readable with good letterspacing down to
around five points (this is the smallest type size on my samples).
Halftones are okay, with the dots smaller than the LaserWriters; however,
it's not a Linotronic.  The blacks are darker than a LaserWriter's, but
you can still see streaks.  The Ricoh engines still have the blackest
blacks in my book.  You can still see jaggies with the naked eyes, although
they are much less evident than on the LaserWriter.  What is difficult to
tell is whether the jaggies are due to the pixels, or poor toner quality:
straight vertical lines have ragged edges; whereas straight horizontal
lines have smooth edges.  Either way, the print quality is degraded.

All in all, it seems like a nice printer, and the disk makes life really
nice for people who use lots of downloadable fonts.

Printware's laser printer has 600 x 1200 resolution, and they say it can
reach 1200 x 1200.  It costs around $16K; however, it doesn't run PostScript,
and it doesn't have a hard disk in it.  The sales rep told me that they are
working on PostScript (or a compatible language thereof) and should make it
available by September.  When that happens, look out!

The Printware printer produces very nice output, much better than the
Varityper VT600.  In fact, to the eye, the difference between the VT600
and the Printware printer appears to be greater than the difference between
the VT600 and a LaserWriter.  It's amazing what happens as you get up closer
to 1M pixels/in**2.

The Compugraphic 400-PS printer's output is almost dull in comparison.  Its
blacks are about the same quality as a LaserWriter's, although they are
"shinier" due to whatever they are using as toner.  Because of uneveness of
the toner distribution (perhaps the machine was running out when it printed
my copy), it's hard to tell how bad the jaggies are (even small letters have
thin vertical white lines running through them).

Pat Wood
Editor, The PostScript Language Journal
bellcore!phw5!phw