| ★ HARDWARE ★ IMPRIMANTE - AMSTRAD DMP 4000 ★ |
| L'IMPRIMANTE AMSTRAD DMP 4000 (Amstrad Magazine) | L'IMPRIMANTE AMSTRAD DMP 4000 (Science et Vie Micro) | Amstrad DMP 4000 (Popular Computing Weekly) |
PRINTS CHARMING Printers can be noisy, aggravating things to use, but these features don't have to become standard. Amstrad's DMP 4000 proves the point, as Tony Kendle was delighted to discover he first Amstrad printer released, the DMP-1, was cheap and it did work, but in many ways that was the best that could be said for it. Designed with a breathtaking disregard for recent advances in the printer industry, the DMP-1 lacked many essential features, most obviously Epson compatibility and a near letter quality print mode, and was rightly critically reviled. The omission of Epson compatibility was a particularly daft decision. It meant that the printer couldn't be used with a great deal of existing software, particularly those that produced graphic screen dumps, and including quite a lot of Amsoft's own program range. Even so they were presumably profitable enough to encourage the company that there was a future in printers - the mistakes were rectified with the release of the excellent value DMP 2000 (together with the new numbering system designed to publically distance the machine from its predecessor). The more recent DMP 3000 was essentially the same machine, with a choice of IBM or Epson compatible modes. When designing its own badged dot matrix machine IBM themselves built upon the Epson standard (did anyone say anything about the pot and the kettle?), albeit with some small modification to the character set offered so that it would reproduce all of the symbols offered by the IBM PC computer. The average user would never notice the difference between the two types except when trying to print something that seemed trivially unimportant to the Americans (such as '£'s). Commercial programs rarely use these extra characters, and almost always provide Epson and IBM printer options together. Alan Sugar has now made a public statement of his commitment that Amstrad should become a major force in printer manufacture. The printer industry is ripe for a shake-up, and Amstrad will be just the Company to do it. The DMP 4000 is the first machine to emerge since this promise was made - so is it good enough to make his intentions credible? The 4000 is advertised as PC compatible. This does not mean that it can run Lotus 129 and Flight Simulator but is has the same character range as PCs do. It is also Epson FX compatible, and like all DMP machines it will work with any computer with a centronics interface. The most obvious difference from its predecessors is that the 4000 is a wide carriage machine, capable of printing on 3^-15" wide paper which is a maximum of 136 columns of 10cpi printing. The paper feed mechanisms provided are, not surprisingly, the bog standard tractor and friction pair, used for continuous and single paper respectively. Loading single sheets on the 4000 is possible rather than pleasant, but at least it is not as hideously difficult as with many machines. By clever design, the heads used for pulling the tractor paper also contain two guides which make it much easier to load and straighten the paper. Unfortunately no sheet feeder options are mentioned and even more disappointingly the 4000 does not provide the semiautomatic paper feed option that was a blessing of the PCW printer. This system, whereby once the bail bar is pulled forward the central plate pulls the paper into position, is becoming increasingly common on machines in the £300 plus price range and it is a shame that Amstrad hasn't learnt from its own success. Regular readers will know of my distrust of infernal tractor feeds that dump the paper out in the ideal position to join up with the paper going in, and causing no end of trouble. The 4000 is better than some, with a special paper separating wire bar add on that for once works reasonably. Using this makes it easy to rig up a system of shelves, pulleys and heavy-weights that ensure that the machine can run unattended, although I still would not dare leave the room for long periods. The print speed is a remarkable advance. It is advertised as 200 characters per second in draft mode but anyone who has bought printers before will know that all manufacturers either appear to make up their speed ratings, or perform their tests in zero gravity vacuum chambers. This is tolerable because all speed ratings seem to be equally brazenly, so comparisons can still be made. Speculating about the real performance of the 4000 is therefore pointless as it would make it seem less good than it is: I can say that it is very probably the fastest wide carriage machine you will find at the price. Even the Near Letter Quality mode doesn't slow it down unbearably and it is a huge improvement over all earlier Amstrad printers, both DMP and PCW ranges. Some special foreign and graphic characters are so large that they require a double pass in draft mode, and four passes in NLQ to complete. Using many of these will slow the machine down. One of the biggest problems with the most recent generations of printers is that whilst they retain IBM, Epson FX or RX compatibility for most functions the NLQ option has really come into its own since those machines were designed. Industry giants are rarely the first to introduce new features to their products so in recent years there has been a bit of a free for all amongst printer manufacturers and no particularly reliable standard has yet emerged for NLQ codes.
This confusion inevitably means that far too few software packages provide NLQ options for printout and Amstrad has sensibly provided both a fairly easily accessible set of dip switches and a front panel button to press at power on which will set the printer automatically into NLQ mode. The front panel controls of the printer are good if not superb. Easy to reach options allow you to send a line feed, reverse line feed, form feed, run a printer test routine One of the nicest features of the Amstrad PCW printers is their ability to ‘mix and match' print styles. For instance they can produce NLQ condensed print, NLQ enlarged print, bold NLQ, etc. It is much more common for many of these print styles to be mutually exclusive, which obviously greatly reduces their flexibility. The 4000 is no exception - NLQ print can be underlined or printed as sub- or superscript but little else. Proportional NLQ characters are possible but cannot be mixed with any other print features. There is an option for italic NLQ but you first have to be in, or switch into, Epson mode. It is a nice point of the 4000 that this switch can be software controlled, since many printers require you to turn the printer off and reset the dip switches. Even so it is a procedure that few software packages will anticipate. The Epson mode also has to be chosen to print the '£' sign or some other 'foreign characters'. Clever word processors such as Protext can be defined to produce bold NLQ by overprinting parts of the text twice. The print quality of the 4000 is generally good, with the exception of the 'i', 'W' and ‘V' characters which look slightly odd in high quality mode.
The manual is workable: it is very clearly laid out but begs many technical questions and at times its brevity is positively confusing. The beginner hears all that can be said about getting the machine out of the box, and is then rather thrown in at the deep end. I am still at sea over many issues such as the size of the printer's memory buffer, or whether it is possible to define new NLQ fonts (I suspect that the answer is no). One of the worst features of the Amstrad PCW printers is that they use purpose designed and frighteningly expensive ribbons. At the onset this lead to temporary shortages of supply and also means that the machines, whilst cheap to buy, can be depressingly expensive to run. The day when manufacturers agree on ribbon compatibility, with a few common and therefore cheaper designs, will be worthy of celebration, but I suspect that big profits are to be made from the sale of sundry consumables if not from the machines themselves. However, I have to admit the cartridge for the DMP 4000 is easy to fit. The 4000 provides the user with a truly excellent control over physical movement of the print head: backspaces, forward and reverse linefeeds of variable sizes, and up to eight predefined sets of horizontal and vertical tabs. Unfortunately very few off-the-shelf programs use these features which is a shame as they can be valuable time savers. One thing that always impressed me about the PCW printer was its surprisingly quiet and un-irritating running. The 4000 is marginally louder, but still very reasonable. It hardly causes any vibration at all and the printing gets finished so quickly that it is extremely pleasant to use. All in all the DMP 4000 is a credit to Amstrad. It is robust and sleekily designed, easy and quiet to use and likely to work without trouble. The wide carriage and the print speed combination are exceptional on a machine of its price, and particularly when using continuous paper it makes long jobs completely effortless. The things I dislike about it are really very minor, or, more to the point, are true of almost every competing product with the notable exception of Amstrad's own PCW. If I am slightly disappointed it is because I was hoping to see a machine that incorporated more of the good ideas that went into the latter machine, rather than just a GT version of the DMP 3000. This isn't, quite, the printer that will make Amstrad stand out in the crowded market, but it puts them in the vanguard. PCW |
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