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--

<you may want to archive the following--it may be a bit long for inclusion in
the digest>

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
<ADHUNTER@aol.com>
<AHUNTE@ccvm.sunsyb.edu>