The Attractor Controversy / Printers
Howard Shapiro (HPANDA@HARVARDA.HARVARD.EDU)
Mon, 04 Jul 94 14:56:51 EST
It was nice to find both thermal (attractors) and inkjet (printers)
discussions on the net after I got back from a two-week cruise...I had
a computer with modem along, but elected not to pick up my E-mail via
satellite at $11/minute.
The attractors debate seems to indicate that FCS is not a standard. I
know it's supposed to be a flexible standard, and that, in principle,
programs can be written to parse and decipher anything which falls under
the spec, but that's not what's happening in the real world. If Verity
or Phoenix or somebody else has to write a conversion program to convert one
flavor of FCS to another, what's the point? And, if such a program does get
written, are manufacturers going to be diddling other file characteristics
such as resource fork information to make programs choke on data not
acquired with their instruments? Never mind the translation program; what
will happen is that somebody will write a freeware program which does what
Attractors does and reads any FCS format within reason.
The "BMW / Chevrolet" model speaks to the major segment of the flow cyto-
metry market which sticks with off-the-shelf hardware, reagents, and
software. Even in that market segment, instrument manufacturers who also
make antibodies are facing stiff competition from third parties with
cheaper reagents. It's entirely natural for a manufacturer to try to lock
the advantages of a new product in to its own user base. Those of us who
do customize or build our instruments are at a disadvantage as a result,
but the manufacturers, who stand to make far less money from us than from
the much larger community of less sophisticated users, don't have much
incentive to care. The moral is that if you're prepared to do your own
hardware, you'd better be prepared to do your own software.
The printer manufacturers aren't doing any better by the flow cytometry
community than are the instrument manufacturers. The present crop of
color printers (Canon BJC-600 and Apple's Color StyleWriter Pro, which use
Canon's 360 x 360 DPI engine, and H-P's DeskJet 560C and DeskWriter 560C,
which use H-P's "600"x300 DPI engine) are oriented toward producing more
realistic printouts of scanned color photographs than you could get with
those manufacturers' older 180 DPI color printers. In my experience,
neither the new Canon nor the new H-P printers are as reliable as the old
Canon A-1210 and PJ-1080 (and Quadram, IBM, and Radio Shack Printers which
used the same engine) or H-P PaintJet. When running under Windows, or
under the Mac Operating System, both the Canon and H-P printers are extremely
slow; for Windows users, SuperPrint, from Zenographics, provides somewhat
faster operation. You can also spend up to $10,000 for color printers using
thermal wax transfer, dye sublimation, and dry ink jet technology, but what
you'll get is better color saturation and, sometimes, PostScript; the big
expensive printers may be even slower than the smaller ones. I've been
thinking of trying to get a license from H-P to manufacture PaintJets. It
seems that the whole scientific instrument market, which can make out fine
with 180 DPI printers, isn't big enough for H-P or Canon to care about.
Everybody's watching his/her bottom line; this is mine. --Howard
CD ROM Vol 2 was produced by staff at the Purdue University Cytometry Laboratories
and distributed free of charge as an educational service to the cytometry community.
If you have any comments please direct them to Dr. J. Paul Robinson, Professor & Director, PUCL,
Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907. Phone:(317) 494-0757; FAX (317) 494-0517; Web http://www.cyto.purdue.edu
EMAIL robinson@flowcyt.cyto.purdue.edu
