did not have in memory. If there was a size, width or font change the characters would have to be recalculated. It is extremely fast and was one of the first low-cost output systems. The 8400 used up to 12-inch photographic paper and could set camera-ready output. It was a cost reduced version of the 8600 which was faster. The 8600 came standard CRT width of 45 picas and wide width of 68 picas. The 8600 had much more computing power than the 8400 but did not have the memory to store a lot of characters so they were decoded on the fly. The unit would set the characters line at a time as long as they fit on the CRT. Small type may be set 6 to 8 lines before the photo paper was advanced. The paper advance was much faster than the 8400 CRT move or 8400 paper advance. All the fonts were stored on a hard disk. 8600 was a big step forward from the Video Setters which ended with the Video Setter V. Video setter was much like a closed circuit TV system that looked at a character on a glass grid, read its width and then scanned the character onto the photographic paper. The scan rate on the paper was fixed but the scan rate from the grid was changed to account for character size. If the vertical scan from the grid was slowed the character on the paper would be larger. Video Setters were almost all newspaper machines and limited to 45 picas wide with a maximum character size of 72 pints. It was a lot slower than the 8600. For a fast typesetter at the time, the APS 5 from AutoLogic was hard to beat. It had a 64-speed paper advance and did not stop to set type. It figured what needed to be set in a band of data and matched the electronic advance to the mechanical advance. If there were parts of a character that were not included in the band of printing it would be printed in the next band or the band after that. The printing scan rate had to be held constant to prevent overexposing or underexposing the type. White space was not scanned but the beam would jump to the next black position. If it was working on a narrow column the paper speed was faster and