Now Printers Come Down To A Classic Price
Sydney Morning Herald
Monday December 10, 1990
HAVING succeeded beyond its marketing people's wildest dreams with its low-cost Macintosh Classic - temporarily out of stock with most dealers -Apple Computer is now preparing to lower the cost of quality printing.
Early next year it will release two new printers for the Mac, one of them amazingly light and portable.
This will be an inkjet model with 360 dots per inch output (60dpi more than laser printers). It will weigh less than 1.8kg.
"It's an incredible little box of tricks that you can pack up and take on the road. It all fits together like a Chinese puzzle," says someone who claims to have seen a prototype in action.
American sources say the Apple inkjet will sell for a list price of less than $600 in the US. This column's guess is that this probably means an Australian price of about $850-$900.
Apple's present low-price printer is the ImageWriter II which sells for a recommended $A895.
But the ImageWriter is noisy and its dot matrix output is low quality compared with inkjet technology. It prints at 72dpi, compared with the inkjet's 360dpi.
That means sharper typeset-quality documents from the inkjet, especially since reports say it will come bundled with Apple's planned new TrueType fonts.
Apple claims TrueType will give results at least as good as the rival Adobe Postscript fonts commonly used on laser printers.
The Apple inkjet printer will use a Canon print engine. It's the same basic engine used in Canon's popular $795 BJ-10 inkjet for IBM-type personal computers.
Canon so far has not developed a Mac interface for the BJ-10, leaving the way open for Apple to market its own inkjet.
What is inkjet technology, anyway? It actually sprang from dot matrix printing.
In dot matrix technology, a number of tiny wires or pins on a print-head form individual characters by hammering out a pattern of dots as the print head moves across the page. The pins strike through a carbon ribbon, leaving the characters imprinted on the page. As a process it's rather crude and noisy- but fast. Inkjets use tiny nozzles in place of the wires. Instead of hammering dots, the nozzles squirt minute droplets of ink directly onto the page.
The process is much quieter - the BJ-10, for instance, emits only a gentle purr - and much less brutal on print heads.
On the other hand, ink cartridges need replacing every few hundred pages and they can clog up completely if the ink dries too quickly.
Canon has overcome this in the BJ-10 by employing a trick called bubble-jet technology. Each nozzle contains not only a stream of ink but also a very fine heating element. (This is a pretty neat trick, since each nozzle is thinner than a human hair.)
Every time you key in the print command, a microprocessor generates an electrical current which sends the temperature in the nozzle soaring to 300deg C.
Under the effect of the heat, ink around the heating element evaporates, forming a tiny air bubble. Pressure from the bubble then forces a droplet of ink out of the nozzle. The moment it hits the page, it dries completely, forming crisp characters and graphics.
It's a clever process, but it's also slow; at least a couple of minutes to print a typical page.
So it's horses for courses: those with a lot of throughput should think instead in terms of a dot matrix or laser printer; those in no rush but with a penchant for good-looking work, produced in near-silence at much less than laser prices, should consider an inkjet.
It's not yet clear whether the Apple inkjet will be battery powered, as is the Canon. If it is, it should be a perfect travelling companion for the Mac Portable or one of the new laptops Apple plans to release over the next year or so.
Meanwhile, the other new low-priced Apple printer is believed to be a new 300dpi Personal Laserwriter, to sell for between $US1,300 and $1,500. A likely Australian price (a personal guesstimate, don't hold Apple to it) may be$2,400-$2,900.
This would be one of the cheapest laser printers on the market. Like the current Personal LaserWriter SC, it would not be a PostScript printer, but would use Apple's own QuickDraw technology. This means it would be better suited to printing simple office reports than complex documents composed with a page layout program like Aldus PageMaker or Quark Xpress.
The new laser printer, like the inkjet model, will come bundled with 13 TrueType fonts: Apple's version of the Times, Helvetica, Courier and Symbol type families.
Apple would no doubt love to launch the new printers at the San Francisco Macworld Exposition in January, but it's doubtful they'll be ready.
A more likely launch date is March, with the official unveiling taking place at the Seybold electronic publishing seminar in Boston.
* The first law of personal computing, it's often said, is that data expands to fill the available hard disk space. No matter how big your hard disk, it's never enough.
With two hard disks perpetually running at 95 per cent or more of capacity, I'd have to go along with that.
Enter DiskDoubler, a marvellous new program for the Mac. If it doesn't actually solve the problem, it certainly puts it off to a more distant day.
At the touch of a mouse button, DiskDoubler compresses files into a fraction of their former space, effectively expanding the storage capacity of your hard disk.
It squeezes most applications to about 60 per cent of their former size. PageMaker and word processing files are compressed by an average 50 per cent; Excel spreadsheets go down to about 35 per cent. DiskDoubler does this with lightning speed. A folder containing 2.5 megabytes of graphics and PageMaker documents shrank 1.16 megs in just over two minutes.
Now there are other compression programs around for the Mac. One of the best is Raymond Lau's classic shareware program Stuffit, used on almost every Macintosh bulletin board in the world to reduce the cost and time involved in downloading and uploading software.
DiskDoubler, however, is a dramatic improvement on Stuffit. For one thing, you can work with the compressed files almost as easily as with the originals
When you compress a file, the icon - the little picture which represents it on the Mac screen - changes to a DiskDoubler icon, but its file name, folder, colour and location remain the same.
Thus you can double-click on a compressed file and it will open pretty well immediately. Close down the application and it will recompress itself again.
This program is a honey. It works sweetly. You can compress files individually, or do them a folder full at a time. The space you win is worth its weight in silicon.
In an hour or two the other night, we reduced Woz, the 80meg hard disk on the office CX, from 72 megs to 55; and The Beast, a 20-meg Supermac drive attached to an SE, from chockablock to 13.5 megs.
More than 20 megs of free space | Such freedom. Such joy. We can again put off the day when we have to to buy a new and bigger hard disk. At least until next month.
DiskDoubler was developed by Salient Software of Palo Alto, California, just up the road from Apple Computer headquarters. Our copy came from North Sydney's Statusgraph, which sells it for $125.
© 1990 Sydney Morning Herald
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