New Breed Of Printers Head For Home Market
The Age
Wednesday June 15, 1994
LOOKING for a printer to hook to your personal computer? If you are a Windows user, be sure to run your eyes over the little-known but increasingly important new breed of GDI printers.
GDI is not a brand but a generic type of laser printer: a new breed that is astoundingly cheap in some cases, yet prints faster than the $3000-$4000 laser printers found in many offices.
At least one GDI printer sells for less than $1000 and many more are expected at this price level or even below it in the near future.
That will put the pressure on inkjet printers, which currently dominate the under-$1000 section of the printer market.
Inkjets, which work by squirting tiny droplets of ink on to the page are quiet, fast and cheap. But their output is not quite as good as laser printing, the tiny tubes that squirt the ink frequently clog and the ink can sometimes smear.
Laser printers have none of those problems, but they are expensive and relatively slow.
GDI promises to fix both those problems.
The first thing to understand about GDI printers is that they work only with computers running under the Windows 3.1 environment.
The initials stand for graphical device interface. This refers to the Graphical Device Language that Windows uses to display text and images on a PC's screen.
When you hit the `print' button while using a traditional laser printer, data describing the page is sent from your PC to the printer, where it is translated into a language the printer can understand - usually either Adobe PostScript or Hewlett Packard's PCL (printer control language).
This process can take a minute or two before the printer spits out your printed page. It can be much longer if you are trying to print a page with complex illustrations - some color printers can literally take hours on a single page.
With GDI printing, the printer is set up to read the Windows data directly.
No translation time is needed. Whatever is displayed on your monitor gets printed very speedily indeed - in some cases printing starts almost as soon as you hit the button.
Since the processing is done in your PC rather than in the printer, the more powerful your computer's processor, the faster your job will print. Some GDI printers will work with 386 processors, but for top speed you need at least a 486SX and preferably a DX, DX2 or DX4.
ANEW Australian report on four GDI printers available in this country confirms that, dollar for dollar, they have enormous advantages over traditional lasers - at least as far as most home and small-business users are concerned. Other users may find they have limitations.
The report is the `GDI Laser Printer Technology Review', published by the Sydney-based International Research Bureau (IRB).
IRB tested the four printers against each other and against a number of traditional laser printers made by the Hewlett-Packard company.
On the GDI side, the printers were: the Dataproducts LZR 888-1 (recommended retail price $2536); the NEC SuperScript 610 ($1197), the Star WinType 4000 ($999); and the Facit P8045Win ($1667).
In terms of sheer printing speed, the Dataproducts showed a clean pair of heels to the other three, as well as to a Hewlett Packard conventional laser printer.
It was also superior in print resolution, printing at 600 dots per inch against the others' 300 dots. But of course, at $2536, it is more than twice the price of some of its rivals.
In terms of value-for-money - or bang-for-bucks, as IRB prefers to put it - the $1197 NEC 620 topped the list, followed by the Star 4000, the Facit 8042, the HP 4MP (the non-GDI printer), with the Dataproducts 888 last.
The bang-for-bucks rating took account of performance, features, warranty and software bundles as well as price.
Before you rush to buy a GDI printer, be warned: there are some drawbacks.
GDI printers do not suit all users, especially corporate users, but more about that later.
For a start, they work only under the Windows environment. So if you occasionally need to print out a page or two from an MS-DOS application, or perhaps a DOS directory listing, you'll be frustrated.
Buy an inkjet or a conventional laser.
Further, to get acceptable results you will need at least a 486 processor.
With most GDI printers you will also need at least four and preferably eight megabytes of spare hard disk space.
If that means upgrading or buying a new PC, the low price of GDI isn't looking so low any more.
The Dataproducts is an exception. Because it has a special controller built into the printer, it can get by with a 386DX chip and half a megabyte of hard disk space. The controller is the principal reason for its extra cost.
Another point: GDI machines are strictly personal printers: you cannot usually access one over a computer network. So they are better suited to home users or individuals in small business rather than for use as corporate workhorses.
If you frequently need to produce multiple copies, you may also find a GDI printer ties up your PC for a long period as it processes and formats each page over and over.
You must wait until the last copy is printed before you can resume work: no great problem if it's a question of two or three copies but a pain in the butt if you are printing several hundred.
GDI printers do not do color. So if you want to highlight your work with color text or graphics, look towards one of the new color inkjets.
Desktop publishers who want to produce professional quality documents would be best to stick with traditional laser printers using the PostScript page description language.
PostScript fonts print better than the TrueType fonts used in GDI, and PostScript is used almost universally by the professional printing houses.
Despite these disadvantages, IRB expects GDI laser printers to grab a share of the market in coming months, especially in the SOHO (small office, home office) sector.
© 1994 The Age
Share This