A LOOK AT THE AMSTRAD STRATEGY APPLIED TO PRINTERS

Amstrad
£159+VAT

The Amstrad DMP2000 has been getting some good reports lately, so, now that the cheaper printer options (the Alphacom 32 and ZXPrinter) have more or less vanished, a good, cheap(ish) dot-matrix printer is always worth looking at.

Like most Amstrad products it's nothing special from a technical point of view, but manages to provide all the basic facilities you'd expect at a very competitive price.

Freed from its blocks of polystyrene packaging it's an odd looking beast - it looks more like a lawn mower without a handle than a normal printer, and this caused a couple of problems initially as we couldn't figure out how to get the ribbon attached or how to feed paper in. After a bit of office brainstorming we realised what was causing the problem: the machine is 'backwards'. Unlike any other printer that I've played with the DMP2000 has paper fed in from the front and the print head is tucked away behind the paper feed mechanism, so that printing is done as the paper comes out at the back. This makes absolutely no difference to the print quality of course but make the machine a bit demanding of desk space.

ALL THE OPTIONS

The options available are about what you'd expect in this price range; the usual pica and elite fonts, and it accepts standard Epson codes for print variations, emphasized, double-strike and so on. There are no flashy self-diagnostic tests, international character sets and the like, but then no other printer under £250 is likely to have these features. The only omission worth mentioning is that you can't seem to underline text when in NLQ mode. This might seem like a bit of a drawback if you want to do a lot of heavy duty word-processing but I can quite happily live without it.

Once I figured out how to get the paper in it printed out text and screen dumps quite happily, and the print quality was perfectly acceptable. The NLQ printing is very good, though it is a little slow. This is the only area where the 2000's performance suffers in comparison with more expensive printers (though it is only in NLQ that the speed is the drawback), but if you've got a lot of text to print out there's no reason why you can't go off and have a cuppa while you're waiting. If you want more speed then you'll have to look at more expensive machines (and there is a DMP3000 and DMP4000 further up the range). I didn't feel that the slow NLQ printing was such a weakness that it made the 2000 unsuitable for word-processing. It might fall into the 'no-frills' category, but it's probably as good as you're likely to get for under £200.