Latest Laserjet Set To Strengthen Market Hold

Sydney Morning Herald

Monday March 5, 1990

By TONY SARNO

HEWLETT-Packard, the company whose laser printers annexed 60 per cent of the world office market and became the industry-standard, last week announced the BIG upgrade.

It released its third generation LaserJet printer, the HP LaserJet III. While new printers are released every week, the release of a new LaserJet is akin to IBM releasing a brand new line of personal computers.

The LaserJets were the first commercially available, reliable laser printers. Riding on Hewlett-Packard's solid corporate reputation for quality, they went on to dominate most markets, including that of the US.

In a classic example of the way computer technology evolves, the new eight-page-per-minute printer has more features than the LaserJet II, which it surpersedes, but is cheaper. It offers sharper and faster printing of text and graphics, and a new capability to reproduce type faces in all sizes - for$4,142 - $357 less than the second LaserJet.

With such aggressive pricing, Hewlett-Packard wants to ensure that its new machine will prevail as its predecessors have done. Laser printers are more expensive than other printers, but they have become very popular for reproducing high-quality text and graphics. Worldwide sales in 1990 are expected to exceed $A4.5 billion.

With a technique known as HP Resolution Enhancement, which adjusts the size and position of the little dots that make up a printed character, the LaserJet III gives the impression of producing more than the industry-standard laser resolution of 300 dots per inch, by smoothing out the jagged edges and the zig-zag effect inherent in 300 dot resolution.

The printer is able to predict what the angles and curves of characters should look like, and fills missing bits or wayward edges by moving the dots around, and reducing them in size.

The printer does not need special software to do this. The technology resides in an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), designed and developed by Hewlett-Packard.

According to the company, "the ASIC intercepts the data and looks at each dot in relationship to neighbouring dots. Dots are then moved to the left or the right, or printed smaller to produce smoother, sharper, and cleaner text and graphics."

According to Hewlett-Packard, the resolution enhancement produces no speed degradation - information is processed as fast as the video signal passes through the ASIC. The company has applied to patent the technology.

The LaserJet III also comes with a new page-description language, called PCL-5. This is the coding that determines how information in the computer is printed on paper. The new language is compatible with that of existing LaserJets, but provides more fonts in more sizes, more flexible page layout, and faster graphics printing.

Industry observers say that PCL-5 has many of the capabilities of the more expensive PostScript language, such as the ability to create virtually any type sizes and to rotate and shade text and charts. For users wanting true PostScript capabilities, however, an Adobe Postscript cartridge can be added. According to Hewlett-Packard this should be available here in April.

Costing $1250, the PostScript printer cartridge contains the PostScript page description language, and 35 Adobe typefaces.

There will also be a Macintosh version of the printer, which will come with an AppleTalk interface and the PostScript printer cartridge.

Eight of the LaserJet III's fonts are "scalable". That means they are stored in the printer as mathematical formulas, while the rest are"bit-mapped", coded as a discrete collection of dots.

Now that the Laserjet has a new ability to use scalable fonts, a user no longer has to settle on fixed, bit-mapped fonts, that are typically eight, 12, 18, 24 and 30 points.

Typefaces can be scaled, or resized in increments from less than 1 point to more than 999.

Special font and graphics effects are possible on the LaserJet III through applications software. These include reverse, oblique, shadown, and mirror printing of fonts; letters and objects can be filled with patterns or shades of grey. PCL-5 allow users to print multiple orientations of text and graphics on the same page.

US analysts believe the LaserJet III could pose a big threat to Apple's own LaserWriter line. The Apple LaserWriter helped popularise the Macintosh for use in so-called desktop publishing applications, which is still the company's biggest stronghold in most markets. Its most powerful systems, based on PostScript, are still the predominant choice of Macintosh users.

Hewlett-Packard's PCL-5 printer language is expected to be compatible also with the major word-processing and desktop-publishing software programs, such as Microsoft Word, Wordperfect, and Pagemaker, of all which have drivers for the previous LaserJets.

Because the LaserJets account for more than half the laser printer sales in most Western computer markets, it is likely that the major software houses will adopt PCL-5 as a new standard, thus further cementing Hewlett-Packard's market domination.