HP LaserJet

LaserJet as a brand name identifies the line of dry electrophotographic (DEP) laser printers marketed by the American computer company Hewlett-Packard (HP). The HP LaserJet was the world's first desktop laser printer. As of 2016, Canon supplies both mechanisms and cartridges for all HP's laser printers.

HP LaserJet printers employ xerographic laser-marking engines sourced from the Japanese company Canon. Due to a very tight turnaround schedule on the first HP LaserJet, HP elected to use the controller already developed by Canon for the CX engine in the first HP LaserJet.

The first HP LaserJet and the first Apple LaserWriter used the same print engine, the Canon CX engine. HP chose to use their in-house developed Printer Command Language (PCL) as opposed to Apple, which adopted the PostScript language, as developed by Adobe Systems. The use of a less-ambitious and simpler Page Description Language allowed HP to deliver its LaserJet to the market about a year before Apple's CX based product, and for $1000 less. The sharing of an identical Canon engine in two competing products continued with the HP LaserJet II/III and the Apple LaserWriter II, which both used the Canon LBP-SX print engine.

HP introduced the first laser printer for IBM compatible personal computers in May 1984 at the Computer Dealers' Exhibition (COMDEX). It was a 300-dpi, 8 ppm printer that sold for $3,495 with the price reduced to $2,995 in September 1985, and featured an 8 MHz Motorola 68000 processor and could print in a variety of character fonts. It was controlled using PCL3. Due to the high cost of memory, the first LaserJet only had 128 kilobytes of memory, and a portion of that was reserved for use by the controller.

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