GENERAL
INFORMATION The LaserJet series II was the first SX-based printer on the market. HP's initial orders were so large that Canon could not build enough to supply both HP and Canon's other customers. Other OEM customers, such as QMS and Apple, had to wait 6 to 9 months to get SX engines in production quantities while HP set industry sales records. For several months, Canon didn't even allow itself production quantities for the Canon LBP-8II. This situation effectively gave HP an exclusive on the SX for all of 1987. The product was a stunning success from the start and seemed to appear on the front page of every computer magazine. By Fall Comdex of 1988, HP was celebrating the fact that it had sold over a million LaserJet and LaserJet II printers. HP did an excellent job of positioning and marketing the Series II. The product had just the right features to work well with the most popular software applications of the time. HP provided prototypes to key software houses long before the II was announced. This insured a healthy library of compatible application programs by the time the II hit the streets. HP spent heavily on advertising and bankrolled the distribution channels. The LaserJet series II became the biggest revenue product in HP's history. Distribution channels were very aggressive and discounted the product heavily. A large percentage was sold through the gray market. HP supported end users directly with HP service. No questions were asked about where it was purchased. HP just fixed it if the serial number was not too old. Low-overhead gray marketers became very efficient distributors and the product ultimately reached end users with a minimum mark-up despite the many middlemen involved. Dealers complained tirelessly that they couldn't make any money on HP printers, and many big HP dealers went out of business. It didn't appear to matter for HP, because there were always more new dealers lined up at HP's doors eager to carry the most successful printer product ever made. From the beginning, the II was available at most computer stores for less than $2000. Discounted street prices dropped to about $1650 by mid-1988 and stayed at that level until the HP LaserJet III appeared in 1990. In the spring of 1990, HP anticipated that the introduction of the LaserJet III would result in an excess inventory of 30 to 40 thousand LaserJet II printers. They therefore dropped prices to dealers to blow out the IIs. The printers sold so fast that HP had far more orders than printers and was even unable to meet some non-cancelable orders. During the blowout, the street prices dropped to only $995. Within a few weeks, most dealers were out of stock, and the few that had product were able to sell it for about $1400. This seemed ridiculously high considering that the LaserJet III was already discounted to only $1550. With well over a million LaserJet series II printers sold, one would think that used ones should be available from many sources at low prices, but they're not. HP II printers rarely need repairs, lots of add-on products are available, and users seem to be quite attached to them. In 1991, dealers who had used IIs could easily sell them for $995. The Series II features both controller and engine improvements over the original CX-based LaserJets. The operator control panel features a 16 character Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) panel instead of a two digit LED display. The front panel's extra characters make it easier to operate that the original LaserJet without referring to the manual. Still, the Series II does have a VCR-like quality that makes it difficult for most users to program. FONT INFORMATION The Series II has only 6 different bitmapped fonts, but this deficiency is made up for by the availability of thousands of font cartridges and by the fact that many software packages come with built-in HP II-compatible soft fonts. Font Cartridge Slots The two font cartridge slots are useable for both font data and executable code. If the CPU sees certain special codes in the font data, it begins executing code from the cartridge. In this way any characteristic of the printer can be changed. Using this feature, cartridges have been developed that change the printer from PCL to HP-GL or to PostScript. Pacific Data Products was the first company to take advantage of the executable code feature of the font cartridge slots when they introduced an HP-GL emulation product called "Plotter in a Cartridge." They followed that product with the successful Pacific Page cartridge, which added Phoenix Page (a good clone of PostScript) for only $695. In 1989, when Phoenix Page was introduced, this was an astonishingly low price. JetWare, UDP, and, eventually, Adobe came out with similar PostScript cartridges. The hardware of the Series II controller wasn't designed to execute PostScript programs. It was designed for printing bitmapped fonts on the fly, and it doesn't have anything comparable to the ASAP technology for PostScript that Adobe and QMS developed for their 68000-based controllers. Because of this, the first PostScript add-on cartridges were very slow (about 1/4 the speed of the original Apple LaserWriter). Improvements in the art of coding PostScript interpreters allowed the Adobe version and other new implementations to perform at close to the speed of a LaserWriter II NT. Early versions of PostScript cartridges required the user to power-down and extract the cartridge to get back to PCL mode. New versions offer host-based emulation sensing and switching. With any kind of PostScript cartridge, users must add RAM. Controller Notes
The HP LaserJet series II controller has the largest installed base of all SX controllers. The beauty of this controller is its compatibility and expandability. The two font cartridge slots are compatible with the single slot of the original LaserJet. The overall circuit architecture was made similar to the older LaserJet and Canon LBP-8A1/8A2 designs, allowing major parts of the firmware to be ported. Custom ASICs were developed to reduce the part count, manufacturing cost, and PC board real estate. The base of the SX engine has about 25% less area for a controller than the top cover of the CX engine. Expansion Options The expandability of the design is brilliant. The font cartridge slots, memory slots, and the video slots have all been used in ways that the original engineers probably never dreamed of, but it was their open architecture that made these exciting products possible. Counting the RAM expansion slot, there are four connectors that can accommodate expansion products, and all of them contain some of the CPU's bus. |
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