Product Reviews

LaserWriter 12/640 PS Plus is never going to win any prizes for innovation, but what it lacks in originality it more than makes up for with its solid performance and reasonable price tag.

This version differs from the standard LaserWriter 12/640 PS in a number of ways. Both printers have 600dpi print resolution, but the 12/640 PS Plus is provided with a built-in duplex unit for double-sided printing and has 12Mb of on-board RAM rather than the 4Mb supplied with the standard 12/640 model. The additional RAM is required for duplex printing, and can be further upgraded to a total of 64Mb if required.

The printer is also supplied with a 500-sheet feeder tray, which is built into the base of the unit. This is in addition to the front-loading 250-sheet tray, and the 80-sheet manual tray that folds out of the top edge of the printer. Together, these three input options provide a total capacity of 830 pages, which should be enough to meet the needs of most workgroups. They can also handle a wide range of print media, including labels, envelopes, OHP film and most standard paper sizes up to A4.

Apple doesn't quote a maximum monthly duty cycle for the printer, as it feels that it's robust enough to cope with all the work you can throw at it. Until, that is, you reach the end of the engine's life, which is estimated at about 300,000 pages. A printer that has such a high storage capacity is obviously aimed at larger workgroups or environments where high-volume printing work is being done, so the printer might have been expected to have an engine life closer to 500,000 pages. Even so, the quoted lifespan is still reasonable for a printer in this price range. Its capacity and engine life should make the 12/640 PS Plus suitable as a workgroup printer and also as a departmental printer that can be used by large numbers of people with differing printing requirements.

Apple designs its workgroup printers with both Mac and Windows users in mind these days, so as well as the expected LocalTalk

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interface the 12/640 PS Plus is also equipped with Ethernet and bi-directional parallel interfaces. The Ethernet interface can work with EtherTalk, TCP/IP and Netware networks, and you can have all three interfaces connected simultaneously.

As well as the Mac driver software, the printer is supplied with drivers for Windows 95 and 3.1, and even for good old fashioned DOS, so it will be suitable for use in even the most diverse workgroups. It supports both PostScript Level 2 and the PCL 5 printer language used in the PC world, and its Autoselect feature will allow it to accept print jobs from both Mac and PC users at the same time, and to automatically select the appropriate printer language.

The rest of the printer's features are fairly straightforward. It's based on a 30MHz AMD 29040 processor, which gives it a rated speed of 12 pages per minute. In our tests, it achieved a speed of about 8 pages per minute when pumping out simple pages of text. That's acceptable for a printer in this price range, especially one with this range of features, but there are faster 12 pages per minute printers on the market.

Text quality was good, both at 300dpi and 600dpi resolutions. Apple's resolution enhancement technology didn't really seem to make too much difference, but that's often the case with 600dpi printers as that resolution produces pretty good quality even without additional resolution enhancement.

Graphics printing is reasonably fast and clearly benefits from the large amount of in-built RAM. Our A4 greyscale images printed at a very respectable 5 pages per minute, and the quality of both text and graphics was very good. Graphics quality is boosted by Apple's Photograde resolution enhancement system, and greyscale images come out particularly well, with nice, subtle graduations between different shades of grey. However, the printer's standard 12Mb RAM will only allow you to use Photograde for single-sided printing. To use Photograde for duplex printing you'll need to upgrade to 24Mb.

The cross-platform networking features, duplex printing and high capacity of the 12/640 PS Plus make it an extremely versatile machine and the difference in price between this and the standard 12/640 is just £300. Some printer manufacturers would charge almost that much just for the 500-sheet feeder tray. This means you're getting the extra RAM and duplex printing virtually free. Admittedly, not all users will need duplex printing or such high capacity, but if you do need these features then the 12/640 PS Plus is an attractive and cost effective option.