Hewlett-Packard Co has announced a new printer and scanner with low-cost colour facilities. The HP DeskWriter C printer produces black or colour output with 300 dots-per-inch resolution. To change from black to colour, says the company, the user exchanges the black-ink print cartridge for a new tri-chamber, colour-ink print cartridge. This holds cyan, magenta and yellow inks which are mixed to create other colours. The DeskWriter C printer prints up to three pages per minute for black and prints a colour page in about four minutes. It works with letter- and legal-size plain paper, transparencies, labels and envelopes. AppleTalk and serial interfaces are included as standard, and a new QuickDraw-based printer driver enables users to take advantage of Macintosh word-processing, business-graphics, spreadsheet, presentation. The printer also offers greyscale black output, and features four internal scalable typefaces Helvetica, Times, Symbol and Courier. Additional fonts are available through the DeskWriter Font Collection and Adobe Type Manager. The HP ScanJet IIc scanner is a flat-bed desktop scanner offering single-pass colour scanning for Macintosh and personal computers. It scans at 400 dots-per-inch resolution and has 24-bit colour capability which enables it to recognise 16.7m colours. The printer-calibration feature enables the matching of the colour input to output from other colour printers. The scanner also has 8-bit greyscale image capabilities for distinguishing 256 levels of grey. The printer-calibration feature optimises image quality for monochrome-output devices, including laser printers and phototypesetters. The HP DeskWriter C printer for Apple Macintosh systems costs $1,100 and is scheduled to ship on September 1. For users requiring only black output, the HP DeskWriter printer is still available for $730. The Macintosh version of the scanner costs $2,000 and the personal computer and PS/2 versions are $2,200. These are also scheduled to begin shipping next month.
