Microsoft At Work makes Lexmark's WinWriter 600 a capable personal laser printer. It's not a good choice for most networks, however.
Ed Perratore
Microsoft outlined its broad At Work strategy for integrating office equipment and PCs in June 1993, specifying five types of hardware as potential At Work devices: fax machines, photocopiers, telephones, printers, and, incongruously, hand-held PDAs (personal digital assistants). Microsoft's At Work partners previewed some pieces of the technology during the official At Work debut to show its potential. Ricoh, for example, demonstrated a prototype of its networkable IFS66 fax machine (which is due this quarter). The fax capability in Microsoft Windows for Workgroups 3.11 also adds to the At Work picture.
The first available At Work device from a company other than Microsoft, however, is Le
xmark's WinWriter 600. The $1399 WinWriter provides a nearly complete model of what At Work can do for printers. In doing so, it demonstrates both goals of Microsoft's At Work strategy. The first goal is to make complex, feature-laden office equipment and PC peripherals more useful through a common GUI (not necessarily Windows) that guides you through setup and operation. The second At Work objective is to integrate office peripherals and PCs as much as possible. This happens through communications capabilities and document-rendering standards that move digital data from point to point in the most useful form permitted by a particular communications channel.
Hooked to a network, an At Work office copier could, for example, serve to scan documents into digital form and send them via E-mail around the LAN. Likewise, a networked At Work fax machine, with a touchscreen LCD to display the At Work GUI, could give you the same control features that fax software now provides for PC-based fax boards, such as of
f-hours fax mailing and routing to mailboxes.
It's a grand plan, and one that's still evolving, with implications yet to be realized. Microsoft's total At Work strategy, however, will succeed only if it receives support from other companies in the hardware, software, and telecommunications industries and if customers are willing to pay for the added functions. My experience while testing the WinWriter 600 indicated that at least some parts of the At Work technology will survive, whether the total Microsoft initiative catches on or not.
A Familiar Story
Microsoft's At Work Printing Software gives the WinWriter two advantages: unusual ease of use and RISC-like performance that belies its fairly slow (and inexpensive) CISC processor. The former advantage comes from the At Work user interface, and the latter from having the host PC preprocess the print image. Using a slow processor also helps to keep the printer's price down.
This printing approach should sound familiar. Microsoft's Window
s Printing System provides the same benefits for Hewlett-Packard's LaserJet II and III printers. Indeed, the At Work software is a scalable update of this older cartridge-based system, which has become an official At Work product by default.
The WinWriter 600, which has the same laser engine as Lexmark's 4029 printers, provides high-quality output and a rated printing speed of 8 pages per minute with 600-dot-per-inch resolution, and 10 ppm when printing 300-dpi output. The WinWriter 600 also has IEEE 1284-compatible bidirectional communication, allowing the printer to provide detailed feedback to the host computer--a key requirement for At Work printing.
Lexmark was able to meet its under-$1400 price point by focusing on Windows. It didn't build in support for HPGL (Hewlett-Packard Graphics Language) or the ability to take a PostScript printing option. If you're printing from DOS, you do get PCL 4 (Printer Control Language) emulation, six printer-resident bit-mapped PCL fonts, and a printer-cont
rol utility. But from DOS you miss out on the At Work software's performance advantages and the pleasurable user interface.
For paper handling in the WinWriter 600, you get a 200-sheet input tray that, to the possible dismay of some users, outputs (collated if you want) to only a 100-sheet upper tray. A snap-on front tray can accept 20 sheets of face-up heavy- and sensitive-stock output, fed through a rear removable manual-input tray. Options include a $349 500-sheet feeder that goes underneath the printer ($359 for legal size), and $229 100-sheet auxiliary and $349 75-envelope feeders that go in the same rear position as the manual-input tray.
The WinWriter comes with a 4000-page toner cartridge. Replacements cost $199 for a 7000-page cartridge and $259 for a 9500-page cartridge, all based on 5 percent toner coverage.
Finer Feedback
The WinWriter's At Work Printing Software takes up a whopping 6 MB of hard disk storage. However, it provides performance benefits and an exceptionally we
ll-designed setup and feedback interface. You also get the 44 TrueType fonts of the Microsoft Font Pack. The At Work software turns the WinWriter into a very smart printer, one that can converse with your PC about print-job status and any problems requiring attention.
During the approximately 10-minute installation process, the software looks for your printer (it must be on-line) and determines the resources of both PC and printer. Changes in setup are a snap, thanks to several graphical panels in the setup dialog box that replace the usual (often unintuitive) click-on options. The panels range from graphical representations of portrait versus landscape to a dot-pattern diagram that changes when you adjust brightness or contrast levels.
When you print a document, a pop-up window gives you an accurate estimation of the time required until the last page drops into the printer's output bin. A status bar at the bottom of the window tells you how many pages of the total have been printed thus far, an
d a masculine voice from your PC's speaker announces such things as "printing completed." I personally tired of the voice and disabled it.
The animated window also provides valuable feedback on printing problems. Its flair for diagnostics isn't flawless, but messages such as "toner low," "check cover/cartridge," "clear paper jam" (I had no jams in nearly 4000 pages), and "paper out" take plenty of the guesswork out of your printing.
Unfortunately, bidirectional communications doesn't work across a network. However, Microsoft intends to issue an upgrade to the software (no date has been specified yet) that will handle this shortcoming. This piece of software will take care of the added communications hop between the client PC and the PC that's hosting the printer. No hardware changes are required.
The WinWriter has a minimalist front panel. Two buttons give you cancel, formfeed, and pause/resume functions; four LEDs indicate ready, printing in progress, paper status, and service needed. Th
e rest is handled nicely through the At Work software, as described above.
At Work Printing
Unlike previous Windows printers, the WinWriter isn't dumb. It has a relatively inexpensive 16.7-MHz Motorola 68000 CPU, and it comes standard with 2 MB of RAM. The Motorola chip isn't fast by current printer standards, but it's good enough to handle the built-in PCL 4 for DOS applications and to team up with the CPU in your PC.
The At Work software is quite sophisticated in getting maximum speed from the printer while involving the host CPU as little as possible. It uses a process that Microsoft calls load balancing to distribute the workload so that the printer processor does as much of the work as possible. Taking the processor and memory configuration of both printer and host PC into account, the At Work software divides each page of a document's Windows metafile representation into bands, analyzes each band for the complexity of its printed objects, and then allocates CPU horsepower and RAM as nee
ded. Typically, At Work assigns the printer processor as much work as it can handle in real time, but on occasion the software will assign it and the host PC the preprocessing of difficult bands before starting up the laser engine.
The At Work Printing Software requires a minimum Windows configuration of a 386SX processor and 4 MB of RAM. The faster the host CPU and the greater the available memory, the faster the WinWriter 600 prints, to the limit of the 8- or 10-ppm print-engine speed.
Another benefit of the At Work software is that every page always prints. Lexmark guarantees that if your PC meets the minimum configuration, a standard 2-MB WinWriter will always give you output, though perhaps not at 600 dpi. On some tests I ran, for example, the At Work software dropped resolution from 600 dpi to 300 dpi with a displayed warning indicating which pages required this action. If you need detailed bit maps at 600 dpi, get the $279 upgrade to 6 MB.
Performance Tests
To test the WinWriter
600, I ran the same NSTL benchmarks used for this month's Lab Report (see "Head to Head: 71 Printers" on page 164). To show the effect of the host PC configuration, I tested the printer attached to two different machines, a Swan 386SX-16 with 4 MB of RAM and a Compaq Deskpro 4/66i with 8 MB of RAM. Except for the text and paper-handling tests, where laser-engine speed was the determining factor, printing with the 66-MHz Compaq was five to seven times faster than with the 386SX-powered Swan (see the figure "WinWriter 600 Printing Performance").
Lexmark suggests that if you regularly print complex bit maps, you should upgrade your printer from the standard 2 MB to 4 or even 6 MB. (The maximum is 8 MB, for which you must discard the standard 2 MB and install two 4-MB SIMMs.) The whole rendered page must fit in the printer's RAM to print as intended.
Lexmark claims that the WinWriter 600 should print faster than HP's LaserJet 4, despite the WinWriter's slower processor. Comparing my WinWriter test
results with the Compaq Deskpro 4/66i to results from NSTL's testing of the LaserJet 4, I can't verify Lexmark's claim. The NSTL results came from testing with a slightly faster Compaq Deskpro 4/66m (also with 8 MB of RAM), and the tested LaserJet 4 had 4 MB of memory. Still, I can say that the results for both printers are in the same ballpark, although HP has just released a faster version of the LaserJet 4.
Weighing In
Your first consideration of the WinWriter 600 must take Windows into account. The printer's most important features, including performance, depend on the Windows-based At Work Printing Software. Performance also depends on the host system.
The At Work user interface is an important feature, but you must determine if the challenges you now face in printing from Windows applications necessitate a printer that says and shows so much. HP's LaserJet 4L and 4P printers provide similar, though less complete, feedback.
As useful as printing feedback would be on a network, the
WinWriter 600 is not a network printer. The status feedback does not yet go any farther than the PC that the printer is attached to.
The WinWriter's lack of PostScript support will be a greater shortcoming for many networks, especially where people use high-end graphics applications or systems other than Windows-using PCs. The WinWriter supports PCL 4, but without the benefit of host processing.
If you don't need a network printer, but you do need fast graphics speed in a Windows environment, you will have much to like in the WinWriter 600: quality output with a helping hand and reasonable graphics speed, plus guaranteed compatibility with Chicago, Windows for Workgroups, and, eventually, Windows NT clients.
The Facts
WinWriter 600 $1399
Lexmark International, Inc.
740 New Circle Rd. NW
Lexington, KY 40511
(800) 358-5835
(606) 232-2000
fax: (606) 232-2380
Figure: WinWriter 600 Printing Performance
Due to preprocessing by Microso
ft's At Work Printing Software, the processing abilities of the host PC have a big performance effect. All results are from using NSTL's printer-performance tests. All times are in seconds.
Illustration: The WinWriter 600's Microsoft At Work user interface, which runs on the host PC, provides detailed feedback during the printer process (shown here) and if any problems pop up.
Photograph: Lexmark's $1399 10-ppm WinWriter laser printer has a minimalist front panel. It relies on Microsoft At Work Printing Software as an interface for configuration and feedback.
Ed Perratore is a BYTE news editor based in New York. You can contact him on the Internet or BIX at
eperratore@bix.com
or on MCI Mail as "eperratore/byte."
Printer at Work
