Not long ago, the standard for business correspondence was the IBM Selectric typewriter. The crisp, clean quality of the type produced by the IBM typewriter with a carbon film ribbon just oozed class and dignity.
When computers got into the act in the early 1980s, daisy wheel printer makers did their best to emulate IBM's office machines by driving a type wheel much faster than any typist ever could. They did a good job - for a stiff price.Today, however, daisy wheels are history. On the low end, they have been replaced by 24-wire dot matrix printers. The dot matrix machines are not quite up to the IBM standard. But they start at only $350, and they are close enough for those who don't suffer from congenital finickiness.
On the high end, the standard for business correspondence today is the laser printer. Laser printers come within a hair's breadth of the office typewriter for high-quality standard business correspondence. Unlike mechanical printers, they are silent and lightning fast.
But laser printers are more than speedy typewriters. With their ability to print in multiple fonts and render beautiful graphs and charts at 300 dots per inch, they have turned computers into miniature typesetting shops.
Unfortunately, with street prices starting at $2,000 for machines with full graphics capability, laser printers have been too expensive for most home, academic and small business users. They frequently cost more than the computer systems driving them.
But in the world of silicon, you can always count on something cheaper and better popping up. Thus it is with two new products that promise to bring laser printing within the reach of the common folk who demand quality but don't have the keys to Fort Knox.
The first is Hewlett Packard's LaserJet IIP. The "P" stands for "personal," and the printer itself is a down-home version of the company's superb office machine.
The IIP lists at $1,495, but it is already available on the street for under $1,000. This is not exactly cheap, but in terms of speed and quality the LaserJet is light years ahead of the best dot matrix machines - for only a few hundred dollars more.
The main differences between the LaserJet IIP and its big brother involve size, speed and features.
The IIP is about two-thirds the size of the office machine, which means it won't crowd you off your desktop.
It also will produce only four pages per minute, compared to eight pages for the LaserJet II. That is still about four times as fast as the best dot matrix printers.
The new laser has room for only one font cartridge, instead of two, and its paper tray holds 50 sheets instead of 200. For home, academic and small business use, these are minor inconveniences.
Like its big brother, the IIP comes with 512 kilobytes of memory. That is sufficient for text, even if you want to use software-generated typefaces transmitted from your computer. However, if you want full-page graphics, you will have to add a megabyte of memory, at about $300.
The second new product for low-cost, high-quality printing is the PacificPage font cartridge for HP laser printers.
The cartridge, from Pacific Data Products, contains software that emulates Adobe Systems' PostScript page description language. The PostScript language, embedded in expensive machines such as Apple's wonderful LaserWriter, virtually created the desktop publishing market.
Besides providing incredibly smooth graphics, PostScript allows fully scaled fonts. This means you can use any typeface in any size and style, including boldface, italic and reverse (white on black).