dillon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU (Matt Dillon) (12/01/85)
[] Review of the Toshiba p1340 I recently put together an XT system for myself, and was recomended the Toshiba P1340 dot-matrix printer. The printer has turned out to be even better than I first thought, hence this review. I bought the printer from PC-NETWORK (and didn't have any problems with them... I guess I'm lucky), for $560 w/tax and all. BASICS: Toshiba P1340 - supports 8.5x11 friction or tractor feed Dot matrix printer, 24 pins Fonts: normal, condensed, quality, quality w/ proportional spacing. Speed: 120 cps, 132 cps, 47 cps, 54 cps (all at 10cpi except condensed mode) The Toshiba supports bit-mapped graphics, total carriage control, and some other goodies. Now, you may say, 'so what'. What blew me out was the letter quality mode. With 24 pins, the letter quality print looks better than an ink-jet (it definately does not look like dot-matrix, you can't see the dots). My first impression, as I took it out of the box was 'well made'. The Toshiba isn't a copy of anybody elses printer, and it isn't epson or IBM compatible in terms of control codes (it connects to the IBM through a centronics port... you can get a serial interface board for it). Though it costs quite a bit ($560), it's well made and durable. For those of you who like making super condenced program listings, you can place the printer in condensed mode and fool around with the vertical and horizontal spacing to get about 180 columns, and at least 88 lines per page (I don't have those exact numbers with me). The bit-mapped graphics can be imbedded anywhere. You simply use an escape sequence (ESC ;NNNN) to tell the printer how many columns you wish to bit-map. You then send 4-bytes for each column. Bits 0-5 are used in each byte; therefore, you may specify all 24 pins for each column. The Toshiba positions the carriage with accuracy I havent seen in your every day Epson. You can get 1440 dots per line out of that particular mode. (Another idea on how good the letter-quality really is.... how about 2880 dots per line) * Vertical spacing control N/48" * Horizontal spacing control N/120" * Full carriage control. Any direction you wish, even reverse-lf Including absolute (line & column) and relative movement * Margins, tab stops, disable carriage movement * Fonts : condensed, normal, letter-q, proportional spacing letter-q * graphics (image data transfers), and special 1/60 or 1/180 carriage increments. * underlining (of course) Again, most of these features you see in other printers. I would like to stress that the difference in my eyes between the Toshiba and other printers is mainly in quality. The printer isn't cheap, but it's durable and very well made. -Matt