★ HARDWARE ★ IMPRIMANTE - OKIMATE 20 ★ |
| Imprimante - Okimate 20 |
Most people have their own idea of what “necessary” means when you start talking about CPC peripherals. Some, for instance, can't imagine life without a modem. Others think of it as the computer equivalent of a CB radio. Printers, however, are a different story altogether. You need one no matter whether your main interest in computers is programming or Pacman. And since printers are so popular, lots of companies are making lots of printers. Deciding which one is best for you depends on what you want to do with it. Which brings us to the Okimate 20. If you're into color printing, this is one way to do it without having to shell out serious money. The Okimate 20 has a 24-pin thermal printhead that transfers dots to the paper by melting the waxlike coating on the ribbons. There are two immediate advantages to this kind of printing. The first is that you get deep, rich colors; the second is that the printer is very quiet. The black and color ribbons are packaged in cartridges that are simple to drop into the printer— and thermal ribbons don't get your fingers dirty! Color ribbons cost about $6 apiece and one ribbon, according to the manual, yields 15 pictures. Okidata recommends that you use special paper, and if you want to do presentation quality graphics, you should follow their guidelines. For everyday uses, however, you can use just about any kind of paper that doesn't have a high rag content or a coating to make it erasable since the wax has a hard time sticking to these types of paper. Multi-part forms are out of the question as well because the printhead uses heat rather than force of impact to put dots on the paper. The text printing capabilities of the Okimate 20 are impressive. It does superscripts, subscripts, italics, underlining, and the near letter quality is fantastic. Characters can be printed in a variety of sizes ranging from 5 to 17 to the inch. As for speed you can get 80 cps in draft, 40 in near letter quality. Telling word processors how to talk to a printer is a much simpler job than configuring graphic software. Every word processor I tried, including AppleWorks, had no difficulty controlling the printer. The Okimate 20 has a built-in 8K print buffer and various bits of printer esoterica can be set by configuring the dip switches. The well-written manual goes into this but I found the factory settings fine—you probably will also. Okidata also provides some menu-driven graphics dump software that's easy to use and makes it simple to take advantage of all the features of the machine. The Okimate 20 is a neat machine. Thermal printing is a bit more finicky about the kind of paper you use, but it's the only kind of printer that will put images and text on acetate as well as paper. If you're in the market for a printer and have a limited budget, take a good look at the Okimate 20 before you buy. It does many of the things expensive printers do as well as a few they don't.
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