The NeXT Laser Printer
Let's face it: There are certain situations in your computer work where you must have printed output. NeXT's answer to this problem is a low-cost 400-dot-per-inch laser printer. There's no entry-level dot-matrix printer offered; NeXT is banking on users preferring laser-printed output. Since the cube handles screen imaging with Display PostScript, it also makes sense to take advantage of a high-resolution PostScript-compatible printer. The printer costs $1995.
The NeXT printer is built around a custom-designed laser engine based on the Canon LBP-SX laser engine. It can print eight pages per minute and uses the same toner cartridge as the Apple LaserWriter II printers. A user-selectable printing mode lets the printer produce pages at either 300 or 400 dpi. The printer has its own power cord, and the power supply is set for 110 volts or 220 V levels with a switch.
The printing process involves imaging the page inside the cube using Display PostScript, and then bit-blasting it to the printer. This is similar to the method used by Apple's LaserWriter IISC, except that the cube uses Display PostScript, and the Mac uses QuickDraw. Since massive amounts of data must be transferred to the printer to produce a page, the printer port has its own direct-memory-access channel.
One limitation of the printer is that it will only work with the cube. Also, you cannot network it like PostScript printers that use Apple's LocalTalk, although you could use a cube with a NeXT laser printer to act as a print server on a network. The cube can print to non-NeXT PostScript printers using its serial ports and Unix printer drivers.