Apple delivers low-cost color

Apple today expanded the color printing market for home and small-business users with two new low-cost color ink jet printers and a color desktop scanner for the Macintosh.

The Color StyleWriter 1500, which sells for $280, comes with color and black-only ink cartridges. It prints black-and-white images at 720 by 360 dpi (dots per inch), while color and grayscale images print at 360 by 360 dpi.

The higher-end Color StyleWriter 2500 sells for $380 and offers color, grayscale, and black-and-white printing at 720 by 360 dpi.

Both printers support 64 TrueType fonts and the ability to drop shaded or solid watermarks onto the background of a page.

To extend cost savings even more, Apple also announced the StyleWriter EtherTalk Adapter, a device that allows users to share StyleWriter printers on EtherTalk networks.

The company today also shipped the $350 Color OneScanner 600/27, a 27-bit scanner that offers up to 134 million color recognition, 300-by-600-dpi optical resolution, and 2,400-by-2,400 interpolative resolution. The scanner will come with Xerox's TextBridge optical character recognition (OCR) software.