Some excitement was generated ahead of yesterday’s announcement by IBM’s decision to mix it in the pricing gutter with Hewlett-Packard Co on the laser printer front, and the company duly launched the IBM LaserPrinter E, which uses a five page-per-minute engine from Okidata and costs $1,500. It prints letter-quality text, and graphics at 300 by 300 dots per inch; data-stream, graphics and paper-handling capabilities are identical to those of the IBM LaserPrinter, using the same single-element print cartridge, and supports the Printer Sharing Option and all the optional paper-handling features, memory cards, font cards, downloadable font packages, and PostScript options on the IBM LaserPrinter. It can also be converted to the 10 page-per-minute LaserPrinter which will be available in June, but for which no price was given. There’s also a new PostScript interpreter for the new printer at $500, but more memory than the standard 512Kb is needed so configured for PostScript printing it costs $2,450. The interpreter has 17 scalable Adobe typeface programs and a version with interpreter and an outline font card with another 22 scalable Adobe typefaces is $900; all are available in the US on Friday.
