BitWrangler wrote on 2021-11-06, 21:50:The Laserjets were well regarded as the holy grail of DTP back then, or for using with a hefty graphic workstation. I don't know if they made much penetration into SOHO unless you had serious output requirements and a budget that allowed... I have a LJ-III stashed.
Ventura Publisher was based on a custom GEM and it supported ESC/P, I think I first played with it in 1987.
Printing was horribly slow though, due multiple printing with small offsets, creating sort of "hi-res" prints.
With the Laserjet that my neighbour bought in 1988, it took a looong time to print with the 10MHz 8088 he used for his DTP business.
The holy grail back then already were phototypesetters, somewhere between 2400 and 2500dpi.
In the newspaper where I worked in the IT dept in the early 1990s, Laserjets were only used in the management due to their good support by commercial software and their relatively cheap price.
In the news departments we had only Apple Laserwriters connected to the net with printserver boxes, because of Postscript (which the phototypesetter also used), so it could be used for proof printing by the journalists.
But all these were like 9-dot matrix printers compared to the Linotype.
The refill business lifted off in that time, too.
Original HP/Canon cartridges were very expensive, and the refills were a fraction of that cost.
In the newspaper we had a supplier who regularly came, fetched 20-30 LBP cartridges and brought "fresh" refilled ones.
Regarding the LJ-III, this was the last good heavy-duty HP laserprinter.
All Laserjets from LJ-4 onwards were cheap plastic garbage, not really durable and broke down easily.
The LJ-III as well as the Imagewriter with the same Canon chassis were really rugged.
They rarely failed, even when the paper cartridge (which protruded from the case) broke because the printer accidentally fell onto concrete floor.
