For those of you who don’t like thermal paper printers and/or have applications that require more than 16, 32 or 40 columns of printout and also want the crisp character image of a dot matrix printer, the least expensive, ready-to-go, 80 column, ink cartridge, tractor feed, plain paper print available for the ZX/TS computers that I am aware of is the Seikosha GP-100A printer from Memotech.
$400.00 may sound like a lot of bread to shell out for a printer that serves a computer that cost under a hundred bucks.
This may be true – but being in the computer business for some time now, my own opinion is that this is super-cheap for what you are getting. Walk into any computer store and ask the price of their cheapest printers. Add to that the cost of interfacing equipment needed for other computers and you’ll soon see what I mean.
Although this is not a letter-quality printer, it is far superior to what the lower priced printers produce. A business could use it for correspondence and in-house data-printouts. The programs in this month’s issue were
Besides, if an individual in the future wanted to step up to a better quality printer, the same interface that comes with the GP-100A will allow the change, providing it uses a Centronics type parallel connector. Memotech offers other more elaborate printers also.
One thing you get for your 400 bucks is fast service. There is not, to my knowledge, any other company selling ready-to-go printers for the TS/ZX computers that ships in less than 30 days and many are over 60 days. I got mine from Memotech in six. Memotech is the King when it comes to consistently fast service for all products I have ordered (Data-Assette is very fast too).
If you order by charge card or with a money order or certified check, you can expect quick response. Personal checks may require as much as six weeks to clear before shipping.
OPERATION
The first thing I noticed, after it was hooked up, was that it didn’t work!
I continuously tried to LLIST a program and the matrix head kept printing all the characters of a line in the same position. The darn head wouldn’t move. With the power off, I tried to move the head to the right by hand, and I noticed a tremendous amount of resistance as the head kept pushing against what I thought was a big spring. Upon closer examination, I found this wasn’t a spring at all but a piece of black convoluted plastic tubing that had been placed on the matrix head guide bar to prevent damage while shipping.
What a bone-head play on my part. In my own defense, I might say that, try as I may, I couldn’t find anything in the documentation about this. I think it’s possible that if I would have kept trying to make the printer print, damage may have occurred. After this tubing was removed, the printer operated perfectly.
The main reason I bought it was to reproduce program listings. The other printers that I have just didn’t give good enough quality copy image for the company that prints the magazine to reproduce.
The old method of making these program listings was to first make a printout from one of the smaller printers and then copy it by hand into the word-processor computer. It isn’t that difficult to find someone to proof-read written words but to find someone to proof-read computer programs is a horse of a different color. Even programmers can easily make mistakes.
But if a program is de-bugged in the computer and the computer printer generates a legible listing, the problem is solved.
What a pleasure to use. The COPY command instead of LLIST is perfect for creating program listings. LLIST prints the listing in 80 columns which is unsuitable for magazine layouts. COPY prints the screen exactly as displayed. The user then lists the program on the screen with the next possible line number and COPYs it again and continues this process until the full printed listing is complete.
The only suggestion I can make which, without it, can cause some minor difficulty, is that the user should introduce an LLPRINT command by itself to the keyboard before trying to print out any data or listing. If this does not occur, some weird characters or spacing may occur before the first desired characters are printed. Also, if the user tries to print any of the Sinclair graphics characters, the printer will either hang up and power must be reset or the printer will ignore the graphic characters and continue past them.
Inverse characters are okay, though, and will be printed as lower-case.
The print speed is listed at 30 characters per second. This is misleading though, because it doesn’t take into account the conversion time needed by the Memotech interface to convert the Sinclair code into ASCII. The printer will print a line, pause for a while and then print the next line, and so on.
The character matrix is 5 by 7 and spacing is 10 characters per inch with maximum character height being 2.82 mm and width at 2.11 mm. The paper is standard 9 1/2 by 11 inch fanfold that can be purchased at any computer store and the ink ribbon cartridge can be purchased at any Radio Shack. The printer can be purchased at Radio Shack also but it’s about $100.00 cheaper with the interface through Memotech. The Tractors can be adjusted from 10 inches wide down to 4 1/2 inches which makes it a dynamite machine for tractor-fed labels for those of you who are serious about mailing lists.
The original, plus up to two copies, can be printed at a time. The printer is relatively quiet and stable while operating compared to some others that I have and have seen that really jump around and are quite noisy.
My next project is to try to find out how to use the interface with some of my other parallel printers which I haven’t been successful with as of yet. Oh well, I’ll keep trying.
For further information contact:
Memotech Corporation
7550 West Yale Ave.
Suite 200
Denver, CO, 80227
303-986-1516
(tell em you read about it in Synchro-Sette)