Hewlett-Packard Ltd has a new colour printer, the HP PaintJet XL, designed to print colour graphics merged with text using a single device. The HP PaintJet XL prints at two to three times the speed of the original HP PaintJet and is intended for departments wanting to share a printer, or individ-uals needing a higher-volume or A3 colour printer. The new printer will be available from November 1, 1989, priced at around UKP2,500. Features include improved media handling, more media sizes, more fronts, better final copies and more pages printed per day. The HP PaintJet XL joins the PaintJet and the PaintJet interface kit for the Macintosh and both series are designed for use with MS-DOS micros and a variety of other machines.The PaintJets work with Microsoft Windows and a new, enhanced driver for version 2.11 will be available from November 1. The printers work also with Apple Computer Inc’s Macintosh Plus, SE and II computers through a new interface kit, which supports features like background printing, font scaling and 32-bit colour but not installation on AppleTalk networks. The kit provides a QuickDraw-compatible software driver, fonts, a cable and user’s guide. In early 1990, HP plans to introduce a cartridge for the HP PaintJet XL that supports applications using the HP-GL/2 graphics language. Also, the new printer will be supported in the HP-UX 7.0 Unix so that the printers can be used with HP 9000 workstations.
