Okimate printers

Your Sinclair

Phil South

RAGE HARD! This month, Phil South blips the lid off a pair of fancy colour printers for the Spectrum, and asks "Is this the end of black and white printing as we know it?" There comes a time in every young man's life when his thoughts turn to a certain subject. Look. I don't mean taking a swan dive down the front of Vixen's leopard skins! I'm talking about pnnters. Yes, printers, those little dot matrix jobbies that go prrrrrt prrrrrrrt prrrrrrrrt and spit out prints of your screens or word processing documents. You have no doubt been thinking about getting one of these items for a while, since that old ZX printer of yours choked out its last shred of aluminium foil and died. But before you shed your wedge for a normal printer, let me draw your attention to a phenomenon which might have escaped your notice, that of colour printers. Yes, really. And it just so happens that two such devices have appeared on my desk. The phenomena of colour printers is a relatively new one, due to the problem of how do you actually get a ribbon which will print boldly and cleanly enough not to look muddy when you mix colours? As the technology to make printers has become cheaper, we are now faced with two colour printers which you can buy for about £200. Which is why you and I can afford to be interested, now. So what are the benefits of these exotic and colourful things, and what will it cost you to use one? STAR LC-10 Star Micronics has been building a bit of a reputation in the last year for producing in-tech, state of the art printers. Its speciality is making compact near letter quality jobs with smooth, Star Trek cases, and all the buttons you need to change styles and stuff on the front panel. The LC-10 is the first of its line to have colour capability, having as it does a nifty four colour ribbon with the colours black, cyan, magenta and yellow all running parallel along the ribbon. The ribbon is continuous, which means that when you get to the end of the ribbon it starts again. The drag about this is that you only know when you're running out of ink when the print gets so faint you can't read it. The printer itself is very compact, being about 15" x 11" x 4", which presents a very slim line on the old desk. The colour ribbon snaps into the head very easily and can be changed with very little in the way of tools. The little paper hatch on the back of the thing, is sculptured to the case, but just a tiny tweak on the appropriate flange and it'll pop open revealing the innards. The tractors which feed the paper in are oddly placed underneath the back of the roller. This is to facilitate 'paper parking'. This means that you can print on tractor feed paper, park it, print on a single sheet, then re-thread the tractor paper, all automatically without touching the tractors or unrolling the paper. All the moving knobs and buttons are very positive and do the job with style. The control panel activates all the functions, and all the membrane buttons bleep, so you know that you've made contact. The printer I received was via that young, thrusting company Miles Gordon Technology, the firm that brought you the Plus D and DisCiple disk interfaces. MGT is considering the benefits of marketing the device, but as it's still shopping around, I suggest you don't bell them up to buy one. (Check the ads in a mag like Computer Shopper, plug, plug, for the best price and from whom you ought to buy it.) The reason I'm telling you this, besides getting in a plug for my favourite mag, is that along with the printer, Bruce Gordon also enclosed a disk with a special screen dumping program for doing colour screen dumps. This used the +D's printer interface and worked really well. But screendumps take a lot out of a ribbon and very soon the colours were looking a bit muddy, on account of a lot of white from the paper. But nevertheless, the actual quality of the individual pixels was very good, and there's a reason for this. The LC-10 is a very hi-res printer, and being a 9 pin job, it produces very sharp printouts. This brings me to the quality of its print. The text is nothing less than superb, and as well as having no less than forty two different text modes, including three different NLQ fonts plus italic, condensed, elite and pica spacing, it also has the mega-sophisticated proportional spacing. (Yes, the combinations of those add up to forty two! Ed) And this is, in the end, where the LC-10 wins out over the Okimate 20. The quality of the print, especially with text is much clearer and better, and mechanically it looks more reliable and workmanlike. For sophisticated business and technical presentation, it's the best you'll get under £500. But if you want something more creative and graphically orientated, then the slightly blurred but bolder print of the Oki wins out. OKIMATE 20 The Okimate 20 is an entirely different animal. It's what you'd call a thermal transfer printer, which means that instead of striking its impression on the paper through an inky ribbon with tiny pins, like the Star LC-10, it uses a plate with a matrix of hot spots on the face, to melt the waxy ink from a celluloid tape onto special paper The paper isn't that special, 'cos you can use ordinary paper, if you want. But it likes slightly smoother paper than normal, so you'd best use the stuff they provide, if you want a really good quality print. You can even use NO ribbon, if you shove some thermal paper into it! The printer is much smaller, with a much tackier feel to it. It might be small in size, 13" x 7.5" x 2.36", but it is quite heavy, weighing almost two thirds as much as the LC-10. All the things like the paper grips and hatches have been kept to a minimum, with as many parts being dual purpose and the only method of actually getting inside it being with the aid of a screwdriver. There is an interface stuck in the side, into which you prod the lead from your Speccy. You can change these from parallel to serial, depending on whether you're using a Kempston interface or the RS232 port from the Interface 1. (It's a good idea to state which of these you want when you buy.) The paper guides and tractors are just clips, and there isn't much in the way of the usual bail (the thing which holds the paper flat against the roller, for your info), just a couple of little rollers on the edge of the paper cutter. As for print quality, the Oki loses out by being thermal transfer, making the output darker than the Star, but more blobby. The waxy ink gives it stronger blacks and more saturated colours, but at the expense of definition. It compensates for this by having 24 'pins'. And it has to be said it does give the better colour screendumps of the two printers. I did have a problem on the printer I reviewed, which I think stemmed from the ribbon. If you check out the comparative screendump, you'll see the paper showing through the print in a bit line down the middle. At first I thought it was a greasy smudge on the paper, but I turned a piece of paper around and it still happened in the same place, so it must have been a dodgy ribbon. But the print around the aberration was excellently solid. I'm sure that with a functional ribbon, the result would have been first class. Text quality is another thing. The way the print is made, is almost exactly the same as those Canon Typestar or Brother typewriters, if perhaps a little chunkier. But you can generate listings of your programs, and write letters with good results. Generally speaking it's a better move to use the Oki if your speciality is graphics. And if you're a bit pushed for space on your worktop, it's an excellent option. It may look a bit cheap, but it's got a heart of gold... and blue, and red... and purple…

FEATURES LC-10 Pins: 9 Speed (NLQ): 36 cps Speed (draft): 144 cps Printer Type: Impact Dot Matrix Size (in inches): 15 x 11 x 4 Weight: 4.7kg Ribbon Price 4(approx): £4.00 Price: £260.00 OKI 20 Pins: 24 Speed (NLQ): 40 cps Speed (draft): 80 cps Printer Type: Thermal Dot Matrix Size (in inches): 13 x 7.5 x 2.36 Weight: 2.8kg Ribbon Price (approx): £8.00 Price: £198.95