. . . But We`ll Never Escape From The Paper Chase

April 06, 1986|By Lamont Wood.

You used to hear predictions of the ``paperless office`` where everyone would have a terminal and bureaucrats would shuffle electrons instead of paper.

Forget it. Corporate decisions still revolve around typewritten documents. Instead of replacing paper, the thrust of office automation has become the efficient production of ``letter-quality`` documents.

The mainstay of letter-quality printing has been the daisy wheel printer, whose output looks like a typewriter`s. They work on the same principle--type fingers whacking against paper--and some even have keyboards. But they are slow (by computer standards) and noisy; they`re regularly sold with acoustic enclosures, so the office workers won`t feel overwhelmed by machinegun-like noise.

Solutions to these drawbacks have been widely sought, with the result that the daisy wheel`s preeminent position is under serious assault by other technologies.

Making a surprisingly good showing are the dot matrix printers. Gone are the days of crude dot patterns--you can get printers for less than $1,000

(from Epson and NEC) with 24 pins in the printhead. The resulting hard copy looks like it came from a typewriter with a coarse ribbon, and is produced at about 50 characters a second, which is about as fast as daisy wheel printers ever get. But even these results are referred to as ``near-letter quality,``

which is damning with faint praise.

So the main assault on the daisy wheels seems to be coming from the

``nonimpact`` branch of the computer family: inkjet, thermal transfer and the glamorous lasers.

Cheap (in the $500 range), fast and quiet, an inkjet printer would seem to be a natural for the office. They haven`t caught on, however. They use tiny nozzles to spray droplets of ink onto the page, but if the paper isn`t of the right texture the ink will spread too much or too little. Work is reportedly underway on units that use solid ink that is melted before being squirted out and that dries immediately, eliminating the spreading problem.

Thermal printers also have problems with paper. They melt waxed-based ink onto the paper with heated nubs. They are mostly made in Japan, and with slick Japanese paper they can produce handsome results. With rougher American paper, though, the results are often pathetic. (They can print without ribbons, using specially treated paper that reacts to the heat, but the result is basically dot matrix quality on nonstandard paper.)

A variant that works with American paper is International Business Machines Corp.`s Quietwriter, a $1,395 printer with ``resistive ribbons.`` The printhead conducts electricity, not heat, and the ribbon has a metallic layer that heats up at any point where current is applied, melting a layer of polymer next to the paper and releasing ink. The cost of ribbons, however, amounts to about a dime for each printed page.

Peter Steiner, vice president of Dataquest Inc., a consulting firm in San Jose, Calif., said that the future of inkjet, thermal transfer and resistive ribbon printers in the office probably lies in their potential ability to use colors, either by having multiple color bands on the ribbons or (for inkjet printers) using multiple reservoirs.

He said that though such printing is best suited now for charts and diagrams, Epson has patented a method of printing with variable sized dots, so that in theory color photos could be printed much the same way they are printed in newspapers.

However, the technology that has caused the most excitement is the laser printer. Such printers are intelligent copiers. Instead of exposing a photosensitive drum to an original and then printing a copy, the drum (or belt) is sensitized by a computer-controlled light source that, essentially, traces what you want printed onto the drum.

Laser printers use a weak laser beam to sensitize the drum. Other

``electro-photographic`` printers use tiny light-emitting diodes (LEDs) as the light source, or use liquid-crystal displays (LCDs) as ``shutters``

between the drum and a light source. (Both LED and LCD printers are commonly referred to as ``laser printers,`` if only to avoid complicating the issue.)

There are also the ``magnetrography`` and the ``ion deposition`` printer. The former has not had much market acceptance, and the latter is not suitable for the office because the printouts have a crushed, shiny look, said Catherine Dingman of C.A. Pesko Inc. in Marshfield, Mass.

Laser printers had previously been represented by large, costly machines. Then, in 1983, Canon unveiled a desktop unit printing eight pages a minute with a resolution of 300 dots an inch. Now there are about 40 vendors using the Canon ``engine`` in various laser printers.

The two best examples are the Hewlett-Packard Co.`s LaserJet, starting at $2,995, and the Apple LaserWriter, starting at $5,999. The LaserJet uses