The personal computer price war now looks set to spread to laser printers as a new generation arrives, forcing down the prices of the older ones. Mobile, Alabama-based QMS Inc yesterday launched Hammerhead, the QMS 860 Print System, based on the company’s proprietary Crown printing architecture and a newly developed high-resolution marking engine from Canon Inc. It is designed to be used with virtually any computer system or network environment and has support for Ethernet, Token Ring, LocalTalk, EtherTalk, parallel and serial environments, which can be active concurrently, receiving data from multiple users in various data formats, and producing completed documents without user intervention. It emulates user-selectable PostScript Levels 1 and 2, Hewlett-Packard Co PCL, HP-GL and Digital Equipment Corp LN03 plus and all popular type formats are supported. The print engine does 600 by 600 dots per inch and uses newly developed Ultrafine toner to produce output with deeper blacks, finer lines, sharper text and photorealis tic reproduction of scanned black and white images. It offers 8.5 by 11, 8.5 by 14 and ledger 11 by 17 printing for spreadsheets, data base reports, business presentations and newsletter production. It ships with 39 fonts for PostScript and a standard set of PCL fonts installed. A Windows 3.1 software driver is also included. It is driven by a 25MHz Intel 80960CA RISC processor said to enable the 8-page-per-minute printer to produce even complex gra phics documents much faster than conventional printers; it is $4,500.
