Used Laserjet
Used Laser Printers could be just what you needed for the price you can afford. Used Laserjet are often recommended by the average customer over a new printer! Buy one online today!
About Laser-jet printers
The story of how HP captured the largest market share in laser printers would make a good course for college business students. Basically, HP planned and executed extremely well to get and hold onto the huge market share it has. As time goes on, it is hard to imagine that HP will be able to continue the series of grand slams it has had with nearly every laser printer model introduced. At the time of this writing (1994), it seems HP is still on a roll. The LaserJet 4 seems to be the finest affordable desktop printer to date. Its beautiful print quality and price blow every other manufacturer away. At this time, we predict that the recently introduced 4SI, and the about-to-be-released 4L and 4ML, will be fabulously successful as well.
What did HP do that made the original LaserJet so successful?
First, HP had the right product for the market of that time (circa 1984Ð1985). People wanted faster, quieter, daisywheel type printers, with more consistent print quality. They wanted more typefaces, more symbols and characters on a page, and they wanted fonts of different sizes for headlines and footnotes. The largest market segment (business word processing) was not ready for desktop publishing and graphics, but they needed more than could be obtained from a daisywheel printer.
Second, PCL was easily adapted to the word processing programs of the day. It was a good half-step between word processing and page processing. The structure of HP PCL is very similar to that of any ASCII printer. The format is basically one of positioning the printhead and placing the character. As each character is placed, the printhead automatically advances to the next position. If the style or the size of the character is to be changed, then an "escape" sequence must be sent before the data is to be printed. Many utilities were created to allow existing software to access the new capabilities of PCL. Unfortunately, most of it was difficult for most users to understand and many people continued to use the LaserJet as if it were a quiet daisywheel printer.
Third, the competition stupidly thought that Diablo 630 emulation was important. Canon decided to keep the Diablo 630 emulation for itself, using it in the Canon brand CX-based printer, the LBP-8A1. Since it had Diablo 630 emulation, Canon wrongly thought it didn't really need to do much work to get software support, because all major programs already supported the Diablo 630 standard. There were so many people cloning the 630 that Cal Bauer, of Bauer Enterprises, created a healthy business testing printers for full Diablo 630 compatibility. Without significant extensions, Diablo 630 emulation just didn't give users all the benefits they expected from their new laser printers. HP PCL provided the extensions that Diablo 630 emulation lacked.
Fourth, and probably most important to the success of the LaserJet, HP got a lot of good software support for PCL early, before other PDLs had a chance since HP didn't have Diablo 630 emulation, it was forced to get PCL supported. HP knew the printers wouldn't sell well without software support, so it generously provided development units to all software companies of any significance. This was the smartest thing that HP did in the early days. It planted the seeds for the HP LaserJet to become the best supported printer ever. Software companies recommended it to their customers and sales were phenomenal.
Fifth, HP listened to customers and made corrections as customers requested features and changes. Switching from RS-232 parallel only was one of the many customer-requested changes HP made. Like the HP version of the Diablo 630 (Model 2601A), the original LaserJet 2686A had only an RS-232 interface. The LaserJet interface also supported the faster RS-422, which worked on cables up to about 1,000 feet; but most computers didn't support RS-422, so its benefits were rarely known to the users. At first, HP engineers probably recommended to management that the RS-232 standard be promoted over parallel on the basis of fewer wires in the cable, lower cabling cost, greater transmission distances and greater noise immunity. But dealers and users hated the RS-232 interface, because most of them didn't understand how to make it work. Even for those who understood it, RS-232 posed an unwanted hassle. When a customer couldn't make it work, he'd bring it to the dealer for help. If the dealer didn't stock the right cable, he'd have to make one. If he made it wrong or didn't match Baud rates, word length and parity settings properly on the first try, then the dealer would look like an idiot in front of the customer. People also liked to share the expensive LaserJet printer with inexpensive mechanical switch boxes, and the +12 to -12 volt levels of RS-232 signals are more likely to generate high-voltage spikes caused by arcing across the contacts of the switch boxes than the 0 to 5 volt TTL signals of parallel ports. Therefore, LaserJets using RS-232 needed expensive repairs more often. Eventually, dealers and users insisted on Centronics parallel, because it always worked the first time and seemed more reliable. Just plug in the cable and go. No more fiddling with cabling, break-out boxes, null-modem cables, and tiny dip switches for baud rate, parity, stop bits or handshaking protocols like XON/XOFF and DTR. Because of this, the revised HP LaserJet Plus included more memory and a Centronics parallel interface, which was always on the board design but not implemented.
Sixth, HP built a distribution channel that moved product quickly with minimum mark-up. In the early days, it was fairly easy for most small computer dealers to become HP dealers. HP sold the product to the big chains as well, and soon HP LaserJets were readily available and almost over-distributed. Dealers complained they weren't making any money, and HP tried to constrain the channel. Low prices benefited the end users and HP. Dealers didn't like it, but if they dropped HP, nobody would come to their stores and look at any other type of laser printer.
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