WE MAKE IT SO HARD

Datel Electronics are one of the country's leading hardware retailers. You may have seen their advertisements in CRASH or may even have bought something from them. If you are thinking of sending off for any of their products in the future WAIT! NICK ROBERTS has checked them out for you first and given marks out of five on the Nickometer!

LC200 Colour Printer
£299.00

How do you spoil your Spectrum rotten? By buying it one of these super dooper colour printers with software, that's how!

With the LC200 Centronics printer you can print out any screen that has been saved on the Spectrum using the SCREEN$ method. The printer goes down the screen line by line printing each colour in turn, gradually building up a picture. This method of printing is time consuming and printouts range from a few seconds to quarter of an hour depending on the number of colours and the detail in the picture.

With the accompaning software you can change the screen you want to print in a number of ways. You can swap the black and white in the picture around, turn brightness off, get rid of the black altogether and even print the screen double the normal size for extra large printouts.

The everyday Spectrum user may find having a colour printer a waste of time. The only real use I can see for it is for computer artists in displaying their work as a hard copy. Of course the printer can be used for normal letter printing as well if you have a word processing package, and a number of different fonts are available, To use it for normal printing all you need do is swop the colour ribbon for a black ink one.

With the printer package you get the printer itself, a Centronics printer Interface and the software to run it. There's nothing else to buy. If you've got £240 knocking about and are wondering what to do with it then this is a really good buy.