From: ADHunter@aol.com Subject: NEC SuperScript 3000M (review) I got my NEC SuperScript Color 3000M printer and have had a day to play with it; here's the report-- It comes with abbreviated sample dye and wax ribbons instead of the full sized ribbons that one would buy as stock supplies for the printer. This makes sense when you figure that the purchaser will want to see what kind of output the machine is capable of before committing to it, but it needs to be taken into account when purchases are made, i.e., you will VERY shortly have to buy extra ribbons if you intend on doing much printing. The demo ribbons are good for (according to the manual) 10 prints each, whereas regular ribbons are good for 25 sheets (dye-sub) or 107 sheets (thermal-wax); you get a dye-sub ribbon, a thermal-wax variable-dot ribbon, and a plain-jane thermal-wax ribbon. You also get two (not three, but also not just one) ribbon carrier, which makes it easy to swap ribbons (the printer only holds one type of ribbon at a time), and you can (apparently) order new ribbon carriers if you think you will be using the printer in more than two different modes. It comes also with abbreviated paper supplies instead of the full sheaf of paper that you would buy as stock. Again, you get 10 sheets of dye-sub paper and 10 sheets of thermal-wax paper. The plain-jane thermal-wax process can be used with plain old Hammermill-type photocopier-grade paper, but the other modes require the special paper. A regular sheaf of dye-sub paper is 25 sheets, whereas a regular sheaf of thermal-wax (variable-dot) is 200 sheets. The printer is downright cute in appearance for a printer of its class--it looks like a StyleWriter's big brother, perhaps because of its predominantly vertical orientation. It fits elegantly onto desktops and other surfaces that would be significantly more swamped by a DeskJet or a LaserWriter. Hookup is simple enough to forego a peek at the manual, although when it comes to hooking up a $1000 peripheral I'm more inclined to look anyway, and did; and the instructions are clear and uncluttered. Took 20 minutes to connect it to the PowerMac including the time it took to open the shipping box. Software is a regular Chooser device (rdev) and the Print and Print Setup dialog boxes are sparse and clean despite an assortment of options (such as speed versus number of colors, saturation controls, printing mode, etc.). Irritatingly, the dialog box that lets you pick the printing mode gives new and potentially confusing names to the printing modes that are described in advertisements and other product literature: to print in dye-sub mode, you pick "PhotoColor"; to print in thermal-wax variable-dot mode, you choose "GraphicColor"; to choose regular plain-jane thermal-wax mode, you simply pick "3-color" or "4-color" or "Monochrome", depending on what type of ribbon you have in the machine. The interface for printing mode, however, is an example of an exceptionally well-thought-out Macintosh dialog box: with so many options, instead of cluttering up the screen with radio buttons, for instance, NEC gives you a pop-down menu like a fonts menu. Once I was hooked up, I quickly printed up a handful of my own art projects, things I had been working on in Photoshop and Canvas. I was impressed with the speed, even in dye-sub mode, which I first used to print a monthly community electric bill from Canvas; it ran faster than prints of similar size and complexity in greyscale had been printing on my old StyleWriter. My concerns about long long printing time evaporated, even though the SuperScript doesn't utilize background printing through the PrintMonitor. It ran astonishingly fast when I tried out the low-end plain-jane thermal-wax mode, processing the printing of a full-page Photoshop document in a couple of minutes and printing it in less than a minute total. However, I had chosen a composite photograph with many gradations of color and people's faces, and the output in this mode was definitely not useable--not even to check colors. The same document that produces such a bad print in plain-jan thermal-wax mode, however, looked surprisingly good in variable-dot thermal-wax mode. Instead of gaping holes in various color areas ("graininess" is an understatement), the output was smooth and the image was clean and impressive. You can tell the different between the variable-dot and the dye-sub prints, but it is less formidable a different than the difference between plain-jane thermal-wax and variable-dot thermal-wax. At least with photographic documents. I intend to try it out again with some simple SuperPaint color logos that use continuous color rather than gradations and see if if plain-jane thermal-wax mode is useful for that. The SuperScript comes with a Photoshop Plug-in that lets you bypass some of the duplicative processing that the main (Chooser) driver uses, and instead rely on the innate capacities of Photoshop, which speeds up printing. However, this looks to be an idea that was released in early beta format. You can't print in landscape view (the ReadMe file advises rotating the image in Photoshop 90 degrees instead); you can't print CMYK documents at all; and, when I tried to print an RGB document from the Plug-in that had been resampled to 300 dpi, I was informed that there wasn't enough memory to complete the task. I have 35 MB allocated to Photoshop and this was the only document open at the time and there's not enough memory? I switched to the regular Print dialog (which works fine in Photoshop although not as fast as the Plug-in) and in this manner printed the document I should have printed first--Adobe's configuration file "Ole no Moire". Halfway through the Magenta process (it prints one process at a time and sucks the sheet back in for the next one, much like the Fargo Primera), bang! My Back-UPS blew its button and killed everything. Check fuse box, reset the button, restart, reopen document, try it again. Once again, bang! So if you have your system on an uninterruptable power supply, you may need to split the NEC SuperScript off of it and onto a separate surge-protector, or else upgrade your UPS to some serious electrical capacity. Having no other immediate options, I replugged the SuperScript into a strip outlet surge protector independent of the UPS and printed a third time (Carmen Miranda has now eaten three of my sample dye-sub prints!). Great color saturation! (I had been worried after seeing some of my own art printed up; now I have to worry about my art practices, but the washed-out colors are not a problem of the printer if Ole no Moire is to judge). But why are there some funny pixelated areas around the lettering in the color-sep boxes where it says "CM", "MY", "CY", etc? And why does the banana lady seem to have blue under her eyes and lipstick stains on her teeth? Uh oh...maybe a printing problem? I reopend the document and use the magnifying glass. Sonuvva...never noticed this before. This gal really DOES have lipstick stains on her teeth and blue marks around her right eye! Same with the funny pixels around the lettering in the color sep boxes...they're in the document itself. Okay, I'm suitably impressed. It prints color nicely. -Allan Hunter