Okidata has the OL830, an eight page per minute desktop printer that uses light emitting diodes instead of a conventional laser engine: the new printers use a fixed array of laser diodes to paint the page one row at a time; they are claimed to be more reliable because they have fewer moving parts and to be more accurate at the edges of the page because there is no optical distortion; the OL830 supports both the Adobe PostScript Level 1 and Hewlett-Packard PCL 4 page description languages; it ships with a software utility called Printer Control Panel that will automatically switch the printer from its native PostScript mode into PCL emulation; the printer uses a 68000 processor and includes 2Mb of random access memory, expandable to 4Mb, and the company says that the memory space enables the OL830 to cache fonts; it includes one parallel port, and a serial AppleTalk port costs an extra $200; the printer comes with 17 Adobe scalable fonts, 26 PCL bitmapped fonts, a 200-sheet paper feeder, and a five-year warranty on the light emitting diode printhead.
