benw@desoto.UUCP (B Weber) (10/02/84)
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I received the following review of the OKIMATE-10 printer from
Frank Prindle, who requested I post it to the net. Many thanks
to Frank for sharing his experience with the printer. Thanks
also to Kit Kimes for sending me additional specs on the machine.
Ben Weber
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Subject: okimate-10
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OKIMATE-10 Color Printer from Okidata, Inc.
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Manufacturer: Okidata, Inc., Mt. Laurel, NJ
Dealer: BEST Products Inc. (Discount Showroom Distributer)
Price: Approximately $210 plus tax including Commodore (or Atari) interface,
black ribbon, color ribbon, cable, manual, diskette, cassette, and
a small amount of paper. (on sale for $20 off that price at store)
Print technique: 8-dot matrix thermal head with heat transfer of ink from a
film-type ribbon to ordinary paper. Will also print on
thermal paper without a ribbon.
Paper: Up to 8.5 inch single sheet or 9.5 inch sprocket feed
Ribbon: Special cassette for OKIMATE-10, Black ~$6.00, Color ~$6.50
Black ribbon good for ~120000 characters (25-75 pages)
Color ribbon good for ~30000 color characters or 10 graphic screens
Fonts: 5 Fonts selectable via control characters -
Normal 10CPI, 80 Char/Line, with descenders
Wide 5CPI, 40 Char/Line, with descenders
Fine 17.1CPI, 136 Char/Line, with descenders
Bold 8.5CPI, 68 Char/Line, with descenders
Reverse Normal 10CPI, 80 Char/Line, no descenders
Case: Supports either Upper case/Graphics or Lower case/Upper case
Graphics Capability: Commodore 1525 compatible
Speed: 60 Characters per second (text), ~3 inches per second (graphics)
Interface: Commodore serial bus, device #4 (jumper selectable as device #5)
Color Capability: Color ribbon with sequential carriage-width blocks of three
transparent additive colors. Photocell synchronization to
beginning of first color block. About 50 colors can be
achieved for graphics via overlay and interleave.
Software: 2 Programs on disk and tape:
Learn to print - a tutorial on using the printer
Color screen print - a utility package which reads color
graphics screens from disk, and prints
them using the color ribbon.
Control Codes:
^O Reset to normal font, non-graphic mode (default)
^N Wide font select
^] Fine font select
^]^N Bold font select
^R Reverse font select
^R+128 Reverse off
^Q Lower case/Upper case select (default if secondary address=7)
^Q+128 Upper case/Graphics select (default if secondary address=0)
^J Line feed
^L Form feed (11 inches from power up position)
^M Carriage return (with optional, jumper selected, line-feed)
^Pcc Tab to column cc (2 decimal digits characters)
^[^Jx Fine vertical spacing for next line is ASC(x)/144 inches
^[^Pxy Fine horiz. position ASC(x)*256+ASC(y)/60 inches
^[B Disable 1 inch perforation skip at bottom of page
^[A Enable 1 inch perforation skip at bottom of page (default)
^H Enter graphics mode (follow with 7 dot high graphics like 1525)
^Zxy Repeat graphics mode (repeats ASC(y), ASC(x) times)
^[^Y Align color ribbon to beginning of yellow/magenta/cyan set
(next 3 lines printed will print on top of each other)
Quality:
Well, here's the bottom line. I didn't keep the printer. While it appears to
be mechanically well constructed, the print quality for normal black on white
printing was pretty terrible. At the darkest density setting (the manual
recommends using a medium setting), the characters were just barely dark
enough to tolerate (and then only on the absolutely smoothest of paper); un-
fortunately the problem is more than darkness, it is consistency. The character
appearance is extremely variable, with different letters on the same line and
different parts of the same letter (both vertically and horizontally) of dif-
ferent darkness, somewhat at random. Since it could have been the ribbon, I
tried thermal paper without ribbon. The result was the same, except the print
was much lighter (totally unacceptable) in addition to being inconsistent.
To rule out a defective print mechanism or head, I tried a second sample and
found it was essentially the same, although slightly worse on thermal paper.
Incidentally, the examples printed in the manual, and the picture inside the
cover of the box show very acceptable black printing, but I suspect they are
doctored. Not being one to give up easily, I took my second sample to Okidata
field service in Mt. Laurel, NJ. The manager there took a look at the print
and said "oh, yes, that is much too light - I'll have an engineer check out
a new one for you." He brings me out a box with a new printer and a piece of
paper which looks semi-reasonable and says that that printer printed this piece
of paper with the light-dark control at mid position. So I leave, get home,
plug it in, and detect no substantial improvement - I couldn't even get it to
print as good as the sample on the *same* piece of paper with the control set
to *dark*, even after trying a new ribbon (they gave me a free box of ribbons!).
Interestingly enough, if you are careful to use the smoothest paper, the color
plotting mode is quite nice; the head moves much slower than in text mode and
seems to be able to more evenly melt the ink onto the paper. The accompaning
screen dump software worked very well, but did have some incorrect color
renditions (for example, the C-64 has 3 shades of blue - the lightest shade of
blue produced by the screen dump program was actually the medium blue of the
C-64 set; many of the grey shades were too dark and acutally dark blue).
Also, the vertical positioning mechanism, while quite accurate, could not quite
avoid gaps or overlaps between the 7 dot high horizontal graphic fields; this
somewhat (but not completely) detracted from the beauty of the final image.
Black and white graphics seems to work ok too - I tried printing music from the
Music Construction Set with reasonably decent results, although not all the
ink seemed to stick to the paper.
This printer is quite rare now, but should be showing up in computer stores
within a few months. You should definitely see one demonstrated (bring some
of your own paper too) before you buy. It may be that these problems are just
the woes of the early production run and that by serial #20000 or so, things
will improve. Then again, perhaps that's all you can get from that price
technology, but if I'm going to spend 10 cents a page for a film ribbon, I'd
like to get film ribbon quality out of it. Ultimately the consumer will
decide if this is going to be an Okiflop or an Okisuccess.
Frank Prindle
Prindle@NADC.ARPA