Nec's Laser Printer Not Quite Perfect
Sydney Morning Herald
Sunday July 31, 1994
IN the small office, a laser printer is now mandatory. They are cheap to run, quiet, and can cost under $1,000. If you use Windows, you have the choice of using a GDI laser printer. These machines take advantage of the power of your PC to do the grunt work, leaving little processing up to the printer itself.
This makes a lot of sense. Why waste money on CPU power in a device you might use only a few times a day? With GDI printers, the faster your PC, the faster things print. The speed of the printer engine is now less important.
A recent exhaustive series of complex tests carried out by the International Research Bureau named the NEC Superscript 610 as the "best bangs for bucks" in the GDI world. But it is not quite perfect.
My tests were not complex, but tasks typical of those performed on a home or small-office laser printer.
Let's say your printer is off. You decide to print a one-page letter. The Star WinType, for example, takes around 51 seconds. The IRB winner from NEC clocked up one minute, 30 seconds. If both printers had gone into power-saving mode, the figures change to 31 seconds for the Star and 37 seconds for the NEC.
These tests were completed using a Word 6.0 for Windows document printing in GDI mode on a 486 DX/66. It would be fair to say the Star is in front in this test.
However, the Star also has the ability to print a postscript file. If you're into desktop publishing, postscript is not an option; it's a must have. To demonstrate, a logo created in Corel took one minute, 25 seconds to print on the Star using postscript. The same image on the NEC chugged along for four minutes, 33 seconds. The NEC does not have a PostScript option, nor can it work on a network, which the Star now can.
To be fair, on a long document the NEC's faster engine started to make up for lost ground. A 10-page Word file took two minutes, 57 seconds on the Star, and a mere two minutes, 12 seconds on the NEC. But most work is done printing short documents.
However, a major gripe I have with the NEC is the single roller which picks up a page from the paper tray and moves it in to the print path. If the paper is not straight, this single roller may cause it to snag as the page is fed at an angle into the NEC's workings. A small hitch, but nothing compared to the paper jam I have witnessed twice inside the NEC. It is possible for a page to snag so completely it concertinas underneath the final heat roller, making it difficult to remove. I have never seen anything like this.
I disagree with the IRB report. I found the Star WinType had a superior paper-feed mechanism, was quieter, cheaper (when you take into account the cost of toner) and the quality on GDI output using graphics was a little better. So much for tests.
© 1994 Sydney Morning Herald
