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Web Developer's Journal Archive SectionThis article is out of date, but may still be useful to some readers.QMS 1660by by Bruce Morris |
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I like to review printers and quite a few pass through our office for review in the course of a year. I get to try most of the new color inkjets, thermal wax and dye sublimation printers. I've also had my hands on most of the latest, large format, high resolution printers that have come on the market recently. I've had paper jams, toner explosions, ink spills, and uncounted thousands of the dreaded "PostScript Error". I'm a printer weenie, a hard copy geek.
Obviously I have my favorite brands. Hewlett-Packard has rightfully earned their place at the top of the printer market. Their printers are dependable workhorses. LaserMaster has taken the idea of host based printers and come out with some extremely nice high resolution units. Even though their PostScript emulation can be problematic at times they generally have a good product. Somehow, in all my printer trials, I never got around to trying out a QMS and I regret I never tried them sooner. The QMS 1660 I've just finished reviewing has to be the finest printer I've ever had my hands on and I can't be coaxed into saying something like that lightly. I usually try to avoid the use of the first person in reviews but I must make an exception in this case because I want everyone to know this is my opinion. This is not simply a recital of the features of the QMS 1660. I am not simply rehashing the press kit that came with it. This is a good solid printer. It's fast, it's extremely sharp, it's easy to set up and gets right to work, and it prints on huge sheets of paper. It's a sexy printer and I don't say that lightly either (in fact, I don't believe I've ever said something like that about a printer before!). It doesn't look sexy. It's a pretty big beast and weighs a lot but if it's going to print on 11.7" x 19.5" it's going to be a bit bigger than the average bear. The resolution can be set to 300 x 300 dpi, 600 x 600, or 1200 x 600. The highest setting is as good as any I've seen from a laser printer and I didn't really notice any loss of speed when printing 1200 x 600. I found I left it on 600 x 600 most of the time and only used the 1200 x 600 mode for camera ready output. Yes, I use a laser printer for camera ready output. I don't print photographs or color separations with it but text and line art comes out good enough for all practical pre-press uses unless you happen to be doing a job for National Geographic. The 1660 spits out 8 1/2" x 11" paper at an amazing 16 pages per minute. It handles the larger paper sizes quite well. I suppose there are places that sell paper in the 11.7" x 19.5" sizes the QMS can handle but I ended up having a local quick print place cut some for me. It's a real pleasure to be able to work with full bleeds without having to resort to imaginative work arounds. I produce a tabloid sized magazine and have been known to resort to tiling legal sized paper and extensive scissors, tape, and glue techniques to obtain the bleeds I needed. If I had a screen or graphic that spanned the tiles I sometimes ended up with four or five pieces of paper glued to a page. With a full bleed printer all that trickery is over. I can put the screens and graphics anywhere I want without having to plan ahead. This not only saves a bunch of time it opens up creativity options that simply weren't there before. 8 1/2" x 11" paper goes in the tray sideways which, although it seems a bit odd at first, I suppose saves on wear and tear on moving parts. It didn't seem to create any problems although when using the printer for regular business use the tray always seemed to need refilling. Graphic output rarely demands huge volumes of paper but somehow outputting letters and day to day business stuff uses enough so that the 250 sheet tray seems too small. Of course you can add another 500 sheet tray. You can then do a neat little trick and set the printer to chain the paper trays so you essentially have 750 sheets available. My unit came with 24 MB of RAM which is what you need if you're going to go for 1200 x 600 dpi on big paper. The QMS 1660 Print System's Level 2 PostScript emulation and Level 1 compatibility work well. I had a huge hassle at first but tech support (a regular toll call but they called me back on their dime several times for long talks) helped me isolate the problem as being a new version of Adobe Type Manger conflicting with an old version of FontMinder. Even now that I've used the printer for a couple of months and tweaked my system and new FontMinder I still have occasional PostScript errors. I don't suppose you can hold it against them though, since all printers seem to do it from time to time. I did find a few fonts that work well with my other PostScript printers but not with the QMS. I could tell some horror stories about LaserMaster's PostScript weirdness but I learned to adapt to those situations. The QMS has fewer weird little "gotchas" than most printers that use emulation. The 1660 has serial, parallel, and Appletalk interfaces and can connect to Ethernet or Token Ring networks. It can use ADI, HPGL, PCL5, and PostScript Level 1 and 2 drivers/language emulations. It is Energy Star compliant. The base model with 12 MB of RAM sells for around $4,100 and with 24 MB it sells for around $5,000. At prices like these you obviously aren't going to plan on buying this printer for everyday use. But think about those plans. I used the 1660 for two months for general office use and the speed and reliability can't be beat. If your office does graphics work would it be worth it to buy a special high resolution, large format printer to only use for the few graphics pages you need to print? Most graphics work doesn't require hundreds of pages being printed in an average day. Usually numerous proof pages are generated followed by a very few camera ready pages. With the extra paper tray the 1660 can handle both the general office work and the high quality, large paper graphics work. I recommend it for an office that has both types of printing needs. I've singled the 1660 out for unusual praise. Sure, big, fast, and very high resolution are qualities that can make me like any printer. But I've compared it to several others in the same category and it's the best printer I've ever worked with. |
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