Postscript To A Laser Printer: Atari
Sydney Morning Herald
Sunday October 14, 1990
EVEN with laser printers falling in price, there's still a surprising gap between the cost of an entry-level laser unit and a printer that has Postscript compatibility.
Many readers will have heard of Postscript, but how many know what it does and, perhaps more importantly, how it works? Postscript is a programming language designed for output devices.
It was first seen in printers, but can now be found on monitors as well with Display Postscript.
Like any programming language, it acts as an interpreter between the computer and the user, allowing instructions to be entered - and read - in more "human-friendly" terms.
In fact, any programmer familiar with the Pascal programming language will recognise much of the structure of a Postscript file. Unlike Pascal, Postscript is not programmed in by humans. Instead, its primary function is to allow different computers to communicate with different output devices.
Thus, a Postscript file created with an IBM PC for a standard laser printer could be read in and displayed on an Apple Mac, and/or output to an Apple Laserwriter printer.
The greatest strength of Postscript is that it uses what are known as scalable fonts - a font may be available in only a small number of varieties for a given software package, but the ability to scale it up or down in size creates thousands of possible permutations for a single word to be printed out.
On the negative side, the user ends up having to pay for another computer system, although on the plus side, you get a printer system capable of printing relatively quickly. Postscript's is also expensive and not as fast some of the competition.
Its plus points are that it will do almost everything in terms of printing. Professional publishers opt for Postscript. Why am I telling you all this?Because Atari has something up its sleeve called the SLM805 laser printer.
Like its predecessor, the SLM804, it has no on-board Ram and little innate processing power. This is because the machine is designed to be plugged into the Atari ST and driven by the ST's 68000 microprocessor plus suitable software.
The current model, the SLM804, is dedicated to the ST.
At six pages a minute, it isn't the cheapest (at $US1,200 in many outlets)and not the best available, even for ST owners. Worse still, the machine is in very short supply in Britain as Australia took the bulk of the British supplies.
This is probably because Atari has been concentrating on getting the STe out of the door first. The SLM805 is due for a major push at the Comdex Fall computer show in Las Vegas next month.
Atari will roll out the machine in tandem with a range of DTP packages for the ST, some of which will be Postscriptcompatible. The advantage of the SLM805 is that it can be plugged into almost any computer, provided that machine has the ability to drive it intelligently.
It will also be cheap.
How cheap? Under the $US1,000 mark say inside sources. That pushes the SLM805 into the same price bracket as the family of Deskjet printers from Hewlett-Packard.
The Atari SLM805 laser printer is a true laser, capable of full graphics imaging - to 300 dots an inch - but at a very low price. The key question on many ST owners' lips is whether Atari has the resources to support and promote the SLM805 as an integral part of an ST-based DTP system.
For non-ST owners contemplating buying a cheap laser, this problem is irrelevant - the SLM805 is a cheap, no-frills laser printer that, if Atari can get its act together long enough to get a respectable shipment out of the door, will sell like hot cakes.
Of course, if you're really into driving the SLM805 laser with an Atari ST, then you could do a lot worse than talk to Austech Computers of Blackburn in Victoria.
The company has just released its portable ST called Tracy. Billed as an alternative to the Stacy laptop, Tracy is based on a standard Atari 520STFM unit and comes in the machine's original casing.
Tucked inside the case are the usual 520 STFM features, as well as 2MB of Ram, an integral 40MB hard disk and a 286 PC emulator plus Apple Mac emulator. The Apple Mac emulator is based around gadgets by Small's Spectre 128 cartridge, shipped in from California.
Austech Computers can be contacted at 157 Whitehorse Road, Blackburn, 3130 in Victoria. Phone: 038941652 (voice); 038941161 (fax); 038942155 (multi-line BBS).
© 1990 Sydney Morning Herald
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