HOTHEADS
If you're not that flush, but you need a printer, stay cool and go thermal. Peter Green comes in from the cold to consider the hottest ones around.
The Sinclair ZX Printer was unique - for its size and price, it was quite a remarkable technical achievement. Still, it did leave something to be desired. All those sweaty paw prints, left all over the silver listing paper. And the print quality would strain the definition of the word adequate, as well as your eyes. Program listings on the stuff cause harassed editors to tear their hair out (or at least that's Kevin's excuse!).
One solution has been to find a way of linking 'real' printers, like the large dot matrix ones, to your Spectrum. For that you need a commercial interface, or you could have a crack at knocking up one yourself. (Of course, you'll need a copy of YS issue 6 for that. Ed).
This works, but your Speccy is now dwarfed by a huge printer - a bit of a shame when Uncle Clive has gone to so much trouble to keep it all small. And it causes even more problems if you've got to squeeze your complete computer setup into the confines of a cramped living room - worst of all it means shelling out between two and three times as much for the printer as you paid for your Speccy. That's good enough reason for me to look seriously at thermal printers.
ANYTHING YOU CAN DO...
So, what can thermal printers do that dot matrix or daisywheel can't? Well, nothing really - except save you a lot of space and some cash. Most of them are quite tiny, and the good news is that they're all comparable in price to a Spectrum.
Thermal printers don't need linked ribbon because they use special paper impregnated with a heat-sensitive ink. The print head is still 'dot-matrix' but the dots are small wires that can be independently heated. The heat makes the ink visible in the correct dot patterns to display characters. Take into account that the saving you'll make on ribbons is offset slightly by the higher cost of the special paper.
It's only got to brush its heating elements over the surface, as the print head doesn't have to strike the paper to form an image. Also, thermal printers ought to be much quieter than dot matrix ones to make its mark. Not so though, I'm afraid - to bring the price down the manufacturers often use fairly cheap electric motors to feed the paper and scan the print head, so you get a different sort of noise, but it's not quieter. It's no coincidence that the least noisy of the printers I tested was also the most expensive.
If you plump for one of the most basic of the thermal printers, you won't need an interface. They are designed as plugin replacements and work directly from the Spectrum bus. The others have standard RS-232C or Centronics ports, so you need a printer interface as well - take this into account when you're considering your budget. For the extra though, you'll get many of the features of the big machines, including emphasised, condensed and enlarged fonts, variable line spacing, international character sets and bit image graphics.
IN THE PICTURE
Bit image graphics means you have direct control over the heating elements in the print head. So, you can print any pattern of dots onto the paper. Interfaces such as the ZX Lprint contain the software that uses this facility to perform a screen dump, so duplicating the COPY command. Although you'll have to bone up on the graphics modes before you get to grips with them fully (especially since most Epson-compatibles are Japanese, with manuals written in Janglish!), they do allow you to draw dot graphics of any kind, unrestricted by the Spectrum screen size or resolution. And as they all use roll paper, you could write a program that printed a frieze type of picture.
NO LIMIT?
Bear in mind if you're considering thermals that, with one exception, none of them can handle A4 width paper, or even cut sheets. Using roll paper means that the top and bottom of your printouts have ragged edges where you've torn them off. Still, that's OK if you only want the printer for listings - or if you're happy sending out letters that look like supermarket checkout receipts.
You'll also need another spare mains socket. All but one of these printers require an external power supply, of the small transformer PSU type. Two of them can run off batteries, but they eat them and if you don't use re-chargeables, your running costs will be unbelievable.
WHAT PRINTER?
Before choosing one of these printers, you'll have to decide exactly what you're going to do with it. If you're looking for a straight replacement for the ZX Printer, then the Floyd 40 is your best bet. Unlike the Alphacom it does a lot of clever tricks besides duplicating a Sinclair printout.
However, if you're likely to be writing letters and so forth, you'll need to look up-market a bit. There, the Epson P-40 equals the Brother HR-5 on features, but for the extra fifty quid, the HR-5 lets you use cut A4 sheets and offers the back-up of ink ribbon if you run out of thermal paper. Remember though, that you'll need an extra interface for both of them.
FLOYD 40
Shive Instruments Ltd, 153 Merrion Road, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4.
Nice software, shame about the case! This is the tattiest looking of the four, but it's got some pretty nice facilities.
I had to repair the thing before I could use it, as the printhead/motor mechanism is secured internally by three drops of glue - not such a great idea for goods entrusted to our postal service! To be fair though it was a pre-production model.
This is another plug-in ZX Printer replacement with a through connector, but this one draws its power from the Sinclair supply.
It offers several formatting modes which use embedded control codes flagged by! Automatic word-wrapping is performed on printed text to make your paragraphs neat. The word-wrap also takes into account that characters may be printed double-width. You can also have double height and inverse characters or any combination of the three that takes your fancy.
If you're printing out listings, you'll get them with right-justified line numbers, and everything else is indented and word-wrapped. All of which makes for very readable listings. Graphics mode prints everything just like the ZX Printer. You'll have to get used to the slight inconvenience of the embedded codes, but the results are worth it.
All information in this page is provided by ZXSR instead of ZXDB