15,000 reasons why a laser printer is better than an ink jet

I bought a laser printer in 1988. I had it through 1996. It started printing a grey stripe down one side. I had it serviced (by hand delivering it to the manufacturer). It worked for a few months, then went back to the stripe. Shortly thereafter, i gave it to a friend who had one of the same model. At least they could use my various consumables. In the end, i hadn’t quite printed 2,000 pages. I replaced it with a MUCH cheaper ink jet. That, in turn, was replaced by a color ink jet.

Sure, the ink jets are slower (1-2 pages/minute rather than 4-6). But the fact is, i try not to print anything. I read PDFs on screen, download books to my Palm, etc. Half the time, by the time a page is printed, it’s out of date. But the real thing i miss from my laser printer is how when the page gets wet, it is still readable when the page finally dries. My ink jet output just smears into an ugly blob.

OK. So laser printers aren’t $1800 (or 300 dpi) anymore. But, i’ll wait until my current printer dies before considering one.

As an aside, my laser printer’s technology was that the printer itself was dumb. It had a memory buffer for two pages. One for the page being printed, and one for the incomming next page. The host (in my case, a Mac) had all the smarts. So, my Mac had the outline fonts, the image rasterization, etc. I had very good WYSIWYG. And, it was tons faster than Postscript would have been. I really liked having total dot control. This is much harder to get with Postscript. I’ve not seen this design offered since. One might be able to do it with USB, firewire, 100BaseT or even wireless these days. Simple data compression could make it print faster.

I use my ink jet for copies too. I wrote my ‘xerox’ script when i had a black and white printer. I use it, most of the time. But now i have a ‘cxerox’ script. After all, the scanner and printer are both color.

Oddly, my ‘xerox’ script is slower on my newer machine, despite having a 7x faster CPU than the old one. When the black and white printer died, which had no Ghostscript support, i bought one with Ghostscript support. That’s good, right? Well, it WAS easier to get graphics up and running. But for the old printer, i wrote a pbmplus filter in C to emit the codes this printer needed. So, my printer scripts first converted to a full precision bitmap the size of a page, which was then converted to printer output. It was much faster than Ghostscript. Oh. And the new printer is 720 dpi, instead of 360 dpi. So, there’s a factor of four.

My script scans the page. But there is significant computing (scaling, etc) before printing. So, the script kicks this into the background. When the script returns, the scanner is ready to scan the next sheet. Thus, scanning, computing and printing can overlap.

I could, in principal, write such a script for my newer printer. But, the new printer didn’t come with a manual describing the codes. So, one way to get them, would be to pull down the source to Ghostscript, and figure out what the codes are from there. It just hasn’t been high priority.