With Postscript printer prices well under $2000 and the added
print load of my girlfriend needing to print from her Mac
Portable in addition to my GS and Mac IIx, I decided that we
should get a new AppleTalk compatible printer. This way she
wouldn't have to bring her file upstairs to print them out on
the old Imagewriter I that I've been using for the past year
or so and I wouldn't have to sit and wait for her files to
print out.

I read every article I could find on AppleTalk compatible
priters from the HP Deskwriter to the Apple LaserWriter NTX
with prices from $499 to $4999. I ruled out the DeskWriter
because it wouldn't work very well (Or at all) with the GS
from what I had read. I ruled out the LaserJet because it it
too slow and can't be networked. The same for the StyleWriter
(Doesn't work with the GS anyway). I did consider HP
compatible Laser printers selling for $599, but again no
AppleTalk. That left me with a fairly wide selection of
Postscript and Postscript compatible "Laser" printers. These
would work with the GS and the Macs with AppleTalk. That meant
no more switchboxes or sneakernet for printer files.

The street prices that I found for Personal Lasers that I
looked at ran from $1300 for the TI PS17 to $1999 for the QMS
PS-410.

The TI was  short on built in fonts and memory and I'd read
some reports of less than average print quality, slow print
times and limited memory expansion.

The QMS cost too much for me since I didn't need anything but
AppleTalk to connect all my computers. If I'd been wanting to
hook up an MS Dos system as well, I'd have looked harder at it
as it will automatically switch input ports and emulation. It
also is pretty speedy when crunching Postscript images. I
didn't much care for it's print quality when I compared it to
the printer I eventually bought.

The other candidates were the Abaton/Everex LaserScript LX and
the NEC SilentWriter II/90. I'd seen them selling for $1649
and $1599 respectively. I couldn't find an Abaton to check out
personally and the previous version of the printer had been
panned in the reviews I read. It has a fast processor, 2.5mb
ram and the emulation/port switching of the QMS, but I was shy
of any printer using a Postscript clone, which is much of the
reason for the low price of this printer. Postscript clone
printers have usually had strange quirks and I didn't need
that complicating things further when I would be using the
ImageWriter Emulator with AppleWorks 3.0.

I did get to look at the NEC, but the only one I found locally
was broken and seemed to be a bit flimsy. It also was reported
to be quite noisey and my office is already noisy enough.

There were other printers available, but those were the ones I
gave serious attention to because of price, performance and
availablity.

I finally settled on the GCC Business Laser Printer II. It's
true Postscript (Version 52.3), so there's no compatibility
issue. It came with 2 megs of RAM, 1.25MB ROM, AppleTalk, SCSI
and RS422 ports, a 200 sheet Letter Size paper cassette.
Parallel, serial ports and LaserJet Series II Emulation are
options. It uses the 4 page per minute, OkiLaser 400, LED
print engine which reduces the moving parts considerably. The
controller uses a 16.67 mhz 68000. (Apple's Personal
LaserWriter NT uses a 12 mhz controller.) I was able to find
it mail order for $1659 delivered to my door.

I've had the BLP II for over a week now and it compares
favorably to the Apple LaserWriter NTX in many ways. The print
quality is noticably better than the NTX and the QMS 410. At
4ppm I found it only marginally slower than the 8 ppm NTX
under real world conditions. (Postscript printers usually
spend more time thinking than printing and the processors run
about the same speed.)

The BLP II a proven product from a company that's has a very
good track record in the Mac marketplace and it's the only
printer I know that has a SCSI port to allow the use of a hard
drive font storage for under $3000. This was a big plus for me
as I have many fonts and one of the systems on the network at
home has limited disk space. Downloading fonts to a hard drive
on the printer also speeds up printing of fonts that aren't
built into the printer. And you only need the store the screen
fonts on your computer if you download the postscript fonts
for storage on the printer's hard drive. (This requires a Mac
to do the downloading.) You can also download postscript page
to the hard drive if you have a page you print often. I've not
quite got a handle on how to print a downloaded image after
it's been downloaded yet.

Memory expansion is inexpensive as well. The printer uses FX
SIMMS which are about $42 each these days, making upgrading
the printer to 4 megs a less than $100 operation. It's very
easy to do this yourself. Upgrades to bring the TI MicroLaser
35 to 2.5 megs runs from $79 to $100 and is a board. I've not
seen upgrades past that. Upgrades for other printers seem to
start at $100 per megabyte in the ads I've seen.

The printer can print to the edges of a sheet of paper as
opposed to most laser printers that can only print within 1/4"
of the edge of the paper. This is helpful when you're trying
to squeeze in an extra column from a spreadsheet or database.

BLP II has a small footprint and the control panel and paper
trays are all on the front of the printer. I've got mine
sitting on top of my file cabinet along with the hard drive. I
find the layout very convenient. The printer defaults to the
manual feed tray if there is paper in it. That makes it easy
to print a cover sheet with letter head from the manual feed
tray and subsequent sheets from the lower tray. It does a good
job of handling business envelopes and comes with Quick
Envelope, an envelope addressing DA for the Mac. It doesn't
seem to like smaller personal envelopes. I tried one, it
jammed, do I went back using business envelopes.

I was able to find the printer for $1649 plus $7 UPS ground
shipping from Campus Computer in Cleveland, OH. (Don't buy
toner from them though, as they overcharge for it.) Toner
costs $22-$25 per 2500 pages depending where you buy them. The
EP is expensive, but lasts 15,000 pages. The per page cost
still averages less than a canon based printer over the long
run. It also has a silent sleep mode that reduces the power
consumption from 800 watts to 70 watts if the printer is not
accessed for a set period of time. This can save you alot on
electric bills if you leave the printer on most of the time.
The rated duty cycle is 3,000 pages per month. (I might print
that many pages in a year.) Mean Pages Between Failure is
24,000 pages. Durability is rated at 5 years or 180,000 pages.

I upgraded the printer upto 4 megs with SIMMS that failed
stress testing in an FX and hooked up a spare 20 meg hard
drive for font storage. I figure most people could put the
same configuration together for under $2000 if they shopped
around. If you don't have alot of font's, you can skip the
hard drive. The additional 2 megs of memory did speed things
up enough to make the $84 investment in SIMMS worthwile in my
opinion.

I used PhoneNet compatible connectors at $15 each and the
existing telephone wiring in the house to connect everything.
It's neat, it works and it was cheap. I also have AppleShare
running on this network, but that's another story. You should
also be able to use a standard printer cable if you're only
connecting the printer to one computer.

I've printed from the GS and Mac with a variety of software.
Appleworks GS prints beautifully, as does Appleworks 3.0 when
you use the Imagewriter Emulator (IWEM). I did find that you
need to select an ImageWriter and not an ImageWriter II or
you'll have serious problems with the margins with the P1 and
P2 proportional fonts. I had no problems at all with the
proportional fonts with the Imagewriter I driver with
Appleworks 3.0. I also printed out MouseWrite and Publish It!
Files with no problems. I haven't figured out how to get the
Print Shop GS to print yet. It insists on either the GS
Printer port or a printer card in a slot to print. I've got an
older copy of the software, so I don't know if this problem
has been resolved with the current version.

I've come to like the printer very much and the more
comparisons I've done with other printers, (Especially
Apple's) the happier I get.

Walt