David Horne with a quick guide to the best printers on the market.

There is a very large and bewildering choice of printers available for the computer hobbyist and not a great deal of published work regarding the suitability of the machines for specific tasks. It is not possible to look at all the combinations of computers and printers but I hope to give a guide as to what can be expected from printers in each price bracket.

I have also highlighted the points that the user should evaluate when contemplating the purchase of a printer. The factors will be weighted differently depending upon whether the required use is business, educational or hobbyist. For this reason I have simply stated the advantages and disadvantages of each approach.

The machines reviewed are all very good value for money and have been chosen on the basis of offering the most facilities within a given price-bracket.

As a general introduction it should be said that ideally a printer should have both Centronics and serial interfaces. It is logical that as the number of homes with more than one computer increases, whether it be one computer per child or just a spare computer, that each computer should be able to share the expensive peripheral devices that are used infrequently.

The annual/biannual cost of upgrading your system can be significantly reduced by purchasing a printer with the common interfaces - RS-232 and Centronics, although just as the last few years have seen an enormous expansion in the areas in which home computing is used, the same is about to happen to the printer.

What this actually means is do not buy a badge-engineered product if it has reduced facilities i.e., either the RS-232 or Centronics interface removed, unless there are overwhelming financial reasons for doing so. It could provide a limitation on your future choice of computers.

The two current main uses of a printer are to obtain listings of a Basic program and to perform word-processing activities. All the printers are suitable for producing listings. Some users may like wide listing paper so that comments may be added to the right of the relevant lines of Basic, but usually these would be added as Rem statements.

The reason normally given for adding comments separately from the listings is either program security - it makes it easier for someone else to follow if a program is correctly annotated - or that the comments can be written in a different colour and therefore stand out much better, enabling the reader to gain a better insight to the workings of the program.

With the limited memory available on many machines, the use of valuable RAM working space on formatting neat program notes for easy reading - if it is not neatly tabulated it will not be very easy to see the remarks - is not something that the user will usually contemplate.

The advent of the very popular four-colour printer plotter enables the user to provide his own listings with remarks coloured for easy viewing. Inserting a pen which has run out of ink into the appropriate colour pen holder - you must not run the mechanism with a pen missing - will provide copies without visible remarks. It took me ages to think of this use for an old dried up pen. Waste not want not.

For word-processing the needs of the enthusiast are not the same as the small business. Generally speed is not that important as the quantity of processed text will be small. The requirement for an A4 print is also not quite such a necessity, as it is just possible to get away with less. For instance, sending text to a magazine in 40 column format will generally be OK as that is how we print it.

Accepting that narrow text is in certain cases permissible, it should only be considered as an interim solution until finances permit the acquisition of a A4, 8 inch wide paper, printer.

Another consideration for word processing systems is lower case descenders. This is the portion of the printed character that is below the general base level of the printed capital letters i.e., the lower case letters g, j, p, q and y. If these sit up on a line the text can become difficult to read, with problems in differentiating between the g, q and 9.

All the printers will work within a normal office environment without creating a significant noise problem, but the dot matrix printers and the ZX printer can cause a disturbance in a domestic environment especially late at night.

In this respect the ink jet and thermal printers are the most suitable, but clearly do not have the capability of producing multiple copies from multi-part paper. I know it's obvious but with the colour matrix printer, only the original is coloured, the carbon copies are black and white.

One of the main uses to which printers will be put in the very near future is electronic mail. Messages can be transmitted to suitably equipped sites at 1200 baud, usually at less cost than posting a first class letter, which should arrive the next day, or of sending the message orally over the telephone.

Think of all the post that you send and how much of it could be serviced in this manner including the payment of bills using a credit card facility. It could be seen in today's climate as a way of greatly reducing costs in a very labour intensive industry.

The development of electronic mail is dependent upon the advent of very cheap Modems, which are also responsible for holding back the demand for access to large database networks. We really are very close to the electronic communications age, not just for big business but also the general public, with all its obvious advantages and sometimes not so obvious perils.

I hate to think what is actually going to happen to the network when the 'enthusiast' gets hold of it with an intelligent terminal; with the new electronic exchanges I can not see how it will be stopped.

A printer uses what is euphemistically called consumables. These affect the ability of the user to actually print hard copy output, tn an office, if the printer runs out of paper, either to to the stationery cupboard and get another box or get some from a local stationery stockist.

It is not quite that easy in the evening at home, a hobbyist is unlikely to carry a large range of spares so it is worth considering what levels of spares is required. A ribbon can dry out if left for any length of time unused and exposed. In such cases, wind the ribbon back and forth to wet it from adjacent inked portions of the ribbon.

Always cap ink pens when not in use. If these run out then you're stuck. Users of the four-colour printer mechanism may prefer to purchase replacement pens from a Sharp stockist who provides packs of four pens - one of each colour.

Ensure that if the equipment is battery operated, the batteries have sufficient charge to produce a clear print, otherwise use the main adaptor. As a general rule, roll paper as supplied is less likely to contain creases and is also less likely to jam. If you use fan fold paper, there may be a requirement for a form feed, otherwise printing over the perforated tear may occur, which besides being difficult to read, creates a lot of printing noise.

The space requirements of fanfold paper is much greater than that of roll paper behind the printer, think very carefully about how and where you intend to install your printer. It is not usually a problem.

PRICE: £400
SPEED CHARS/SEC: 66
NO. CHARS/LINE: 132-80
TYPE OF PAPER: Plain
PAPER WIDTH: 8-9"
PAPER LENGTH: N/A
NO SHTS: £15 for 2,000 sheets
COST: £
COST OF INK: ££7.50

PRINT CAPABILITY (Yes/No)
UPPER/LOWERCASE: Yes
GRAPHICS: Yes
SCREEN DUMP: Yes
COLOUR: No

INTERFACES
RS232: No
CENTRONICS: Yes

A very fast quiet ink jet printer with manual control of the print intensity Capable of very high quality graphics. I could not use the roll paper as the machine was supplied without a left hand support bracket.

CONTROLS
CHR$ 7 Bell
CHR$ 9 Horizontal Tabulation
CHR$ 10 Linefeed
CHR$ 11 Vertical tabulation
CHR$ 12 Formfeed
CHR$ 13 Carriage Return
CHR$ 14 Double width characters
CHR$ 15 Standard characters
CHR$ 16 Print start position address
CHR$ 20 CR without LF (DC4)
CHR$ 27 ESC commands
CHR$ 26 Repeat commands