Your laser printer should be good enough to do exactly what
you need. You should choose aat least a 600 dpi PostScript
laser printer. PostScript is your only choice in the Mac
world, but PC outlets offer several choices.
If you plan to send your book to the printing house in
electronic files, the 300 dpi laser printer provides
everything you need in a printer. You can use it to proof and
format your book. If you plan to send laser printout, you
should choose a 600 or a 1,200 dpi laser printer. Such output
quality will be good enough to send directly to the printing
house.
Note that you will find your PostScript laser printer easier
to handle if the printer is intrinsically a PostScript laser
printer. A printer that requires a PostScript cartridge to
print PostScript documents will often be difficult to set up
with your software. Using a printer with a PostScript
cartridge adds one more level of complexity to your
software-hardware configuration.
Hewlett-Packard now offers the LaserJet 4MV, a laser printer
capable of PostScript and HPGL at 600 dpi. That printer works
well, but you are paying for the versatility. Consider whether
you really need both. The HP LaserJet 4MV is quite expensive,
while you can find a good 600 dpi PostScript printer for about
$1200.
Your PostScript laser printer should carry at least 4 Mb of
memory. You’ll need more for printing graphics-heavy
documents at a reasonable speed.
Remember that the ppm speed quoted for a laser printer is
the speed at which it prints copies of a single page. That is,
a six page per minute printer will print six pages per minute
when printing six copies of page 1. However, when the printer
is printing pages 1 through 6, the printing speed depends on
the complexity of the pages as well as the speed of the
printer. It may take one minute to print a single page for the
first time, but only one minute for the next six copies.
