Hewlett-Packard Co yesterday launched what it claims are the lowest-priced true 600-dots-per-inch printers it has ever offered: the HP LaserJet 4P printer at $1,300 and the HP LaserJet 4MP at $1,730. The LaserJet 4P and 4MP printers are driven by a four-page-per-minute 600dpi Canon Inc engine. A new paper path design and new fusing technology, reduces edge curl and creasing, and enable users to print wrinkle-free envelopes of varying thicknesses, index cards as small as 3 by 5, folders and paper up to 42 lbs, the company claims. The LaserJet 4P printer comes standard with 45 scalable typefaces, enhanced HP PCL 5 printer language, and 2Mb of memory expandable to 26Mb. It is driven by a 16MHz 80960 RISC and has parallel and serial ports with auto-input-output switching. The LaserJet 4MP printer adds auto-language switching between Adobe Systems Inc PostScript Level 2 and enhanced PCL 5, 80 scalable typefaces and 6Mb of memory, expandable to 22Mb. It has a 20MHz processor with cache, two SIMM slots and hot input-output switching. LocalTalk, serial and parallel interfaces also are standard. When used with the new JetDirect EX network interface, the LaserJet 4P and 4MP printers support Apple Computer Inc EtherTalk, IBM Corp LAN Server, Microsoft Corp LAN Manager, Windows NT, Windows for Workgroups, Novell Inc NetWare, TCP/IP and Unix. The company also introduced the first inkjet printers that can double as desktop and portable colour printers, the HP DeskJet 310 printer at $380 for Windows notebook computers and the HP DeskWriter 310 printer for Macintosh PowerBooks $380. The DeskJets offer functionality similar to that of the DeskJet 500C and DeskWriter C printers: black or colour printing on plain paper and other media, but weigh about 4 lbs and are about half the size of a notebook personal computer. Both can be powered by battery or AC adaptor and offer 300 dots-per-inch resolution for black or colour text and graphics. They run at more than three pages per minute when doing black text and they print a colour page in about four minutes, the company claims.
