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Printer Impressions

The big news in printers around the ECN network has been laser printers. These printers use a laser beam to "paint" the image of a page of text or graphics on a drum. The image painted on the drum is affixed to a sheet of paper in a process much like that used in a photocopy machine. The image is made up of a very large number of dots. 240 dots per inch in the older printers and 300 dots per inch in the latest generation of printers. With such high densities of dots per inch the output from a laser printer is comparable to that of a phototypesetter.

The ECN currently recommends two brands of laser printer. The least expensive is the LaserWriter made by Apple Computer. The ECN has a software package which allows users to print graphics and text on this printer from any of our host machines. The printer is rated at eight pages a minute, but actually runs between 4 and 7 pages per minute in our tests.

For high volume output applications, the ECN recommends the line of laser printers from Imagen, Inc. The largest of these printers was recently installed in Andy Huges' Technical Typing area in Electrical Engineering. It runs at roughly twenty pages per minute and can print about 500 pages between refills of its two paper trays.

For more information about laser printers at the ECN, please contact Dwight D. McKay, EE 348b, 49-43561 or "mail mckay".

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