QUALITY PRINT AT A LOW COST

While the prices of dot matrix printers have been falling in recent years the price of daisywheel printers has remained fairly high, with only one at under £300. The Ibico LTR-1 is an 'impact band' printer which gives daisywheel quality print for only £169.95.

The low price means that it has a limited number of features, but surprisingly it has both Centronics and RS232C inputs as standard.

The printer is small, measuring 298mm by 63mm by 198mm, and is designed to take standard A4 sheets of paper. Tractor-fed paper can be used if the perforations are removed. There are no feed buttons provided, only a manual knob which, annoyingly, has to be pushed in and turned to feed the paper. You can only feed forwards.

Few control codes are available. The printer uses a buffer to store one line before it is printed. Carriage return and line feed operate as normal except that if they are received in reverse order double space printing is performed. Backspace deletes the previous character in the buffer, which means that you cannot use underscore to underline text.

Like a daisvwheel the printer is fairly slow. It operates at 12 characters per second, which is average for a daisywheel.

Despite those limitations we had no problems driving it from both Tasword II and Quill or obtaining listings. The output is reminiscent to that from a portable typewriter and, apart from being uneven in places, was very good. If you are looking for a low cost daisywheel printer the LTR-1 represents value for money.

For further details contact Saga Systems, 2 Eve Road, Woking, Surrey GU21 4JT. Tel: 04862 22977.

GETTING INTO PRINT

ZXC looks at two low cost, high quality printers.

Ibico LTR -1
Supplier: Saga Systems, 2 Eve Road, Working, Surrey GU21 4JT (04862)22977

If you use your computer for anything other than beating back never-ending hordes of aliens, a printer is becoming almost an unavoidable necessity. As the QL includes the excellent word-processing package Quill in the price, owning one without the accompanying printer is rather like owning a shotgun without any shells, but its difficult even to take full advantage of the Spectrum without one.

The only problem is that printers of any quality can be horrendously expensive, often costing twice the price of the computer. Fortunately, prices have been dropping recently and even better news a range of low cost, high quality printers looks certain. Basically the idea seems to be to give the buyer high grade print without all the added features that, however desirable they may be, add substantially to the cost. Already two machines of this type have appeared on the market, the Brother M-1009 and the Ibico LTR-1 sold in this country by Saga Systems.

IBICO LTR-1

If you want high grade letter quality print at a very reasonable £120 (previously £169.95) then the LTR-1 is the (only) answer, but it carries few, if any, additional feature, like the M-1009, the LTR-1 weighs 3kg but is slightly smaller measuring 298mm x 198mm x 63mm. It prints at 12cps and employs a unique golfball like head mechanism that takes its ink from a roller (replaceable at £2.50) situated directly behind it. The head is estimated to have a life span of 20 million characters and carries only one typeface, Elite 12, to work with. The character set consists of 96 letters and symbols spread over a barrel like arrangement of five wheels.

The LTR-1 comes with a Centronics interface but there is a mechanism for adapting it to directly accommodate an RS232C connector to effectively convert it into a serial printer. It is designed for A4 paper (or anything smaller) and has an annoying paper feeding knob that has to be pushed in to turn and is hard to get a real grip on. A slightly bigger knob offering a real grip would be a distinct improvement. Nonetheless anyone wanting straight forward computer printout and letters manuscripts with a very high quality letter print at a bargain price should seriously look at the LTR-1. The print is indistinguishable from a good typewriter and would be ideal for anyone willing to sacrifice a bit of speed in exchange for an economical wordprocessor.

Both Brother and Ibico deserve a great deal of credit for bringing quality printing within a price range of the non-dedicated computer hobbyist and the small businessman toying with the idea of some computerisation. Of the two, Brother's M-1009 is clearly the choice for those wishing to take full advantage of the capabilities opened up by linking a printer to a good computer but Ibico have provided the main essentials at a price that more people can afford. Both companies have taken advantage of the downward trend in printer prices by opting for quality output at bargain prices. In the long term, it's the user that gets the benefits.