New H-P Models Define Higher Standard for Printers

Typeset-quality printing for the price of standard office laser printing is finally a reality. And high-quality, large-paper color printing suitable for business graphics has become more affordable too.

Hewlett-Packard, which established the standard for laser printers for the office and for many home computer uses, has defined a higher standard with the 600-dot-per-inch LaserJet 4 and LaserJet 4M models.

With printing resolution four times higher and speed up to six times faster than the LaserJet III it replaces, the H-P LaserJet 4 will sell in the same $1,400 to $1,500 street-price range. The 4M model, which includes Adobe’s PostScript printing language and more memory to handle Macintosh graphics, will sell for about $2,200 to $2,300. List prices of the two machines are $2,199 and $2,999, respectively.

In the color market, Lexmark International Inc., a former IBM division that is now an independent firm, has introduced the IBM Color Jetprinter PS 4079, which lists for $3,495. This printer is a 360-dot-per-inch color ink-jet model capable of four-color process printing that yields true black and millions of color hues. It can accommodate paper up to 11-by-17 inches.

The IBM printer includes PostScript and can be connected concurrently to three computers via parallel, serial and Apple LocalTalk ports. Printing costs range from just 15 cents a page on plain paper to 26 cents a page on coated paper, and the business-quality results are impressive.

Hewlett-Packard’s new black-only laser 600-dot-per-inch printers produce text, graphics and photographs that look as good as most magazine printing, even under strong magnification. That means you’ll no longer have to send black-and-white, graphics-intensive jobs such as newsletters and even brochures out for typesetting.

The standard LaserJet 4 can have two computers connected, one to its serial port and the other to its parallel port, and it will properly handle simultaneous printing jobs from both. The LaserJet 4M for the Macintosh allows serial and parallel connections to IBM-compatible computers, plus it has an Apple LocalTalk interface to a Mac or a network of Macs. It can accept PostScript printing jobs from any of the three ports. It automatically senses whether the page should be printed in PostScript or in Hewlett-Packard’s own printing language and sets itself accordingly.

I found the printer’s performance dramatically faster with Windows documents than previous LaserJet models.