Laser Printers

The first desktop color laser printer has been introduced by QMS Inc., and it's only $12,499.At that price, the printer can produce color even before it's ordered. The accountant will turn gray, the boss will see red and there will be smatterings of envyish green and jaundiced yellow among people now using conventional black-and-white laser printers.On the other hand, the QMS Color Script Laser 1000 does represent a breakthrough. Until now, such machines have sold for $20,000 to $40,000."It's what the market has wanted ever since they accepted the concept of the laser printer," said L. Mills Davis, president of Davis Inc., a consultancy in Washington.

The Hewlett-Packard Co.'s new Laserjet 4L personal laser printer, for DOS and Windows computers, is better and cheaper than its popular predecessor, the Laserjet IIP. At a suggested list price of $849, and a probable discounted price of $650, the 4L might be the laser that blasts dot-matrix printers into oblivion.Hewlett-Packard plans to deliver another version of the printer, called the Laserjet 4ML (list price $1,279, with a street price of about $999), for Macintosh computers and those PC users who use the powerful Adobe Postscript Level 2 software.

New program reduces paper in the workplaceAccording to Nine to Five Software of Boulder, Colo., we chopped down 350 million trees last year to make 3,360 billion sheets of office paper.That fact bothered company President E.R. Haas so much that he created the PaperLess Printer, a program aimed at reducing the amount of paper used in the workplace.Most word-processing and desk-top publishing programs recognize the need to display a reduced-size preview mode. It lets you see a document as it would appear on the printed page.

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Apple Computer Inc., continuing to cut prices but still not reducing them to IBM clone levels, introduced six computers last week -- half of which will sell for under $2,000.Also included is the first color model of Apple's wildly popular PowerBook notebook computer.The machines extend a shift in the company's sales to less profitable computers. Apple hopes to offset this by selling more computers, but it could be forced to trim expenses if the gamble doesn't pay off. The company said it sold 30 percent more computers in its most recent quarter than it did a year before, and expects the growth to continue.

Three years ago I bought a Hewlett-Packard LaserJet II printer. I plugged it in and put it to work, and it has been turning out beautiful documents ever since. It's the best piece of computer equipment I've ever owned.A couple million other people have done the same thing, and w have a problem now. While there are newer printers with higher resolution and fancier features, it's hard to justify spending the money on one when the old LaserJet is still working perfectly. And given HP's industrial-strength design, the old LaserJet is likely to keep chugging away for years.

SHAREWARE(These are reviews of shareware programs for IBM and compatible computers. The programs are available from bulletin boards and computer clubs. Users try them, then pay a fee to register.)*LASER LETTERHEAD PLUS:The letterhead on your business or personal stationery says a lot about you and your company.You want first class? Laser Letterhead Plus projects an image about you and your thriving business that reeks of success. And you don't have to spend a fortune going to professional designers.

If you think your laser printer is only good for business correspondence or publishing the occasional newsletter, think again.With the right software, a laser printer can perform all kinds of interesting tricks that can make you and your business look a lot better.One of the niftiest laser printer programs I've used is Avery Label Pro. It's been one of my workhorses for almost two years now, and the latest version is an example of good software getting better.As its name suggests, Label Pro prints labels -- mailing labels, shipping labels, file folder labels, inventory labels, square labels, round labels, diskette labels, audio cassette labels and videotape labels.

You can tell a lot about a business by the quality of the junk mail it produces.If someone tries to sell you goods or services with a flimsy flier that looks like it was printed with one of those kiddie programs that does party invitations, chances are you'll toss it in the trash without a second glance.But when someone sends you a colorful brochure, with typeset-quality printing and graphics on heavy, coated stock -- with a Rolodex punch-out -- chances are you'll at least look at it before you throw it in the trash.

The recent Earth Day observations provided an opportunity to observe how the personal computer can help people support ecological causes and how people can help make computers less taxing on the environment.It may seem oxymoronic to call computer printers environmentally sensitive. Printers are voracious consumers of paper, and thus of trees.An intriguing new computer printer developed by Kyocera Electronics Inc. claims to be environmentally sensitive, however, not because it uses less paper, but because it has no disposable parts.

The computer industry has a knack for creating big solutions to big problems. But what about the little problems, like printing addresses on envelopes?It seems that most offices I visit, no matter how computerized, have at least one typewriter around for typing on envelopes. Traditional PC printers and software make the job too cumbersome, but there are some solutions.Most laser printers, for example, have a tray where you can feed in envelopes and other odd-sized documents. However, your word processing program may not have any idea where to put the information.