Use a 386 unix as a home machine?

[Rick Richardson]

In article <129 at van-bc.UUCP> sl at van-bc.UUCP (Stuart Lynne) writes:
>In article <1989Dec30.071817.3232 at pcrat.uucp> rick at pcrat.UUCP (Rick Richardson) writes:
>>>>>[re: HP LJ IIP printer]
>>
>>The compression mode refered to as TIFF 4.0 on the IIP is the PackBits
>>compression mode.  It is a straightforward extension to simple run length
>
>>The IIP is the fastest parallel interface laserprinter for this

I should have also added "300DPI" to this statement, since a 400
DPI laser would be sent a 200DPI image, rather than being forced
to print at higher resolution to maintain image quality. 

>We are also some using RLL encoding with postscript printers. Seems to 
>work fairly well.

I haven't actually seen an under $6000 Postscript printer that could
run the engine at full rated speed for even mundane typesetting
tasks.  PCL printers, on the other hand, can do this easily.  Images,
of course, are a different story for both, the bottleneck usually
being the communications to the printer.

>I was told the IIP was a fairly slow printer - 4 pages per minute engine? 

Yes, the engine is rated at 4 PPM.  However, being a PCL printer, you
can actually get very close to the 4PPM out of the engine.  JetRoff
will run the IIP engine at full speed in most cases, as it does the
Series II.  The exceptions are the initial delay while the first page
is being transmitted, and if a page contains, say, a font sample sheet
where a lot of glyphs have to be downloaded.

>What kind of throughput do you actually get?

The engine, if not starved for data, will run at 3.9 PPM or so.
But, in these tests, the engine is starved or nearly starved.

Depends on what resolution you'd like the image printed at.
Here are some PCL byte counts for a three page FAX that we received
with a large number of vertical stripes on each page (bad scanner).
The original FAX image was 80K in T.4 format in case anybody cares.
I'd call this document a pathological case that foiled our
output optimizations for the older Series II.  The IIP really
shines for this worst case type of document:

				100DPI			300DPI
Series IIP		 104K/61 secs/3PPM	 296K/121 secs/1.5PPM
Series II		 344K/122 secs/1.5PPM 	1367K/425 secs/.4PPM

So, even though the IIP engine is rated at half of the Series II,
it achieves at least twice the performance of the Series II for this
type of printing.

I won't quote the signatures again, since I try to limit the
commercial stuff to after the "--".  I see that Unifax claims
to have implemented the troff FAX capability we had from day one.
I wonder what answer Stuart has for our latest addition - FaxJet...

-Rick

-- 
Rick Richardson | Looking for FAX software for UNIX/386 ??? Ask About:  |mention
PC Research,Inc.| FaxiX - UNIX Facsimile System (tm)                    |your
uunet!pcrat!rick| FaxJet - HP LJ PCL to FAX (Send WP,Word,Pagemaker...) |FAX #
(201) 389-8963  | JetRoff - troff postprocessor for HP LaserJet and FAX |