Color LaserWriter 12/600 PS

The Color LaserWriter 12/600 PS was a color laser printer from the LaserWriter series that was released by Apple Computer on June 19, 1995. It had the distinction of being the heaviest and most expensive Apple printer ever made.

Description
The 12/600 PS could print at a resolution of 600-dpi from a Canon LBP-HX print engine that could output 12 pages-per-minute in black only with a rated life of 300,000 pages, or 3 pages-per-minute in full color with a rated life of 150,000 pages. It utilized FinePrint and Color PhotoGrade to adjust individual dot sizes to simulate smoother edges and near-photographic quality produced by higher resolution color printers of up to 2400-dpi, but the 12/600 PS had a base memory configuration of 12 MB that needed to be upgraded to 16 MB to enable these features when printing on legal-sized paper. Contone memory compression technology allows it to use less RAM while printing detailed color documents.

The 30 MHz AMD processor could rasterize images from PostScript Level 2 printer data;  is not supported. The data could be transmitted through a LocalTalk network to its serial port, or a direct PC connection to its. It also supports faster EtherTalk or  networking over a proprietary AAUI Ethernet port. A compact HDI-30 SCSI port could be used to attach an external drive to store additional fonts; it also contains space for an optional internal hard drive.

Included fonts
39 PostScript Type 1 fonts are included in ROM. 64 TrueType fonts are also included on CD-ROM with the printer driver software.

Discontinuation
The 12/600 PS was discontinued in October 1996 and replaced by the lower-priced Color LaserWriter 12/660 PS.

Legacy support
Apple phased out support for printing over the old AppleTalk-based EtherTalk protocol in Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). Printing over is possible, but this requires configuring an  address over Ethernet by a Mac running Apple Printer Utility for classic Mac OS, Apple LaserWriter Utility for Windows, or TCP/IP Configuration Utility for Unix.