prindle@nadc (01/26/85)
The Blue Chip M120/10 Printer A Review Why might you find this printer interesting? It's price tag is $200 on sale from time to time at BEST Products; and it sure is a lot of printer for that price! Here's a rundown of the major features: Printing method: dot-matrix, 8x9 dot field per character with half-dot horizontal resolution. Printer width: Paper size 4" to 10", fanfold, single sheet, or roll. Sprocket feed or friction feed (or both simultaneously). Printable width 8". Original and 2 copies on multi-part paper. Print head: 9-pin head, square pins (1/80" by 1/72"), 30,000,000 character life (replacable). Printing speed: 100 characters/second or 120 characters/second (inconsistent documentation?), bi-directional printing in some character sizes and modes. Line feed is 200 milliseconds. Ribbon: Multistrike carbon on plastic film; equivalent to ribbon cartridge for Mannesman Tally Spirit 80 or Commodore 1526; approximately $6.00 to replace; ribbon life ~1,000,000 characters. Character Size: Normal Pica - 7/80" wide, 8/72" high, 10CPI Normal Elite - 7/96" wide, 8/72" high, 12CPI Enlarged - 14/80" wide, 8/72" high, 5CPI Condensed - 4/80" wide, 8/72" high, 17.75CPI Enlarged Condensed - 8/80" wide, 8/72" high, 8.875CPI Enlarged Elite - 14/96" wide, 8/72" high, 6CPI Proportional - 2/80" to 7/80" wide, 8/72" high, Variable CPI Super/Subscript - 7/80" wide, 4/72" high, 10CPI Condensed Super/Subscript - 4/80" wide, 4/72" high, 17.75CPI Character Sets: 24 selections of sets; each set a different combination of some of the following: 96 - Ascii 96 - Ascii italic 64 - Katakana 103- Block graphics (8x8) 39 - International special characters 48 - Greek alphabet (Character sets are high quality, but not Near-Letter-Quality) Line Spacing: 6LPI, 8LPI, programmable in increments of 1/72" or 1/216". Reverse line feed in the same increments. Print Emphasis: Emphasized mode - each dot of each character is struck twice and slightly elongated horizontally. Double strike mode - each dot of each character is struck twice and slightly elongated vertically. Underlined mode - 9th pin is fired under all characters and between characters giving continuous underline. Emphasized is available only in certain sizes but may be com- bined with Double strike for super bold characters. Interface: Centronics parallel is standard, but RS-232 serial may be available. Centronics interface provides for 8 data lines, strobe, ack- nowledge, busy, paper-out, selected, auto-feed, reset, and error lines. Programmability: Compatible with EPSON control codes and escape sequences. Actually a superset of EPSON codes - far too numerous to list here! Buffer: Printer comes with 112 byte input buffer; this is expandable to 1792 bytes or 3840 bytes by addition of 1 or 2 Hitachi 6116 RAM chips (~$5.00 each). 3840 byte buffer holds about 1 single spaced typed elite letter page. A switch allows 1792 bytes of the buffer to be dedicated to holding a downloaded character set (8x8 or 7x9) and Vertical Format tab channels. Switches (External): On-Line, Form-Feed, Line-Feed, Buffer allocation, Default printing mode, Default form length, Default line spacing, Default Column length, Default skip-over-perforation, Slashed Zero Option, Default Character Set, and POWER. Indicators: Power, Paper-out, Ready, On-line, Audible-beeper (short beep on ASCII BEL code, long beep on error/paper-out) Graphics Modes: Single density - 80 dots/inch by 8 dots (8/72" high) Double density - 160 dots/inch (overlapping) by 8 dots 9 Pin - Same as Single or Double density, but 9 dots high Special Modes: Self test 1 - repeats entire character set over and over Self test 2 - repeats 95 Ascii characters in a ripple pattern Hex mode - Prints each byte received in hex, 20 per line (Each special mode is selected by holding down the Form-feed and Line-feed switches in various combination during power up). WOW! All that and so far I've only found three minor "bugs": 1. One of the two British characters sets is missing the British Pound sign. 2. The horizontal plotting dot density is greater than that of the EPSON printers; thus plotting programs intended to output to EPSON printers will produce plots slightly compressed horizontally. (not really a bug) 3. The ACKNOWLEDGE pulse coming back from the CENTRONICS interface is 10 micro- seconds long; it should be 5 microseconds. This appears to cause minor problems with some Apple IIe screen dump software/hardware combinations. Available from the same manufacturer and retailers is the Blue-Chip Commodore interface (Commodore serial bus to Centronics) for $40. This is nothing more than a Cardco ?+G interface stripped of it's dip-switches (ie. permanently soldered into EPSON mode), and at that price, is a real bargain. Commodore users should also find this printer works well with the Tymac, Xetec, and Micrographics interfaces in EPSON mode. The print quality is vastly superior to any other printer I've seen demonstrated in the under-$300 price range (the square pin technology goes a long way toward the high quality). As the ribbon becomes more worn out, the print quality remains excellent, but the text takes on a slightly uneven quality from word to word or line to line as more or less used sections of the ribbon come under the head. Since the ribbon is in a cartridge, it's quite easy to use an old ribbon for draft quality work or listings, and pop in a relatively new ribbon to produce a final document or letter from time to time. In graphics mode, the square pins allow areas to be fully filled in with black even in the single density mode, a distinct advantage over EPSON printers. There is a warning in the manual about prolonged duty cycle restrictions on continuous pin firing (due to overheating), but in graphics mode, the firmware seems to have built in pauses such that the duty cycle could never be exceeded. With normal text, the only way this could be a problem would be if many lines were all printed continuously with underlining turned on. This is definitely a lot of printer for the money. Even the case seems to be very high quality. The warranty is 180 days (6 months). The manufacturer is: Blue Chip Electronics 2 West Alameda Drive Tempe, Arizona 85282 602-991-9833 Marketers: BEST Products, LaBelle's, Jafco, Dolgin's, Miller Sales, Rogers, Great Western. Toll-Free Number for information: 1-800-556-1234 (in CA, 1-800-441-2345) PS: Warning - In BEST Catalog showrooms, there are a small quantity of printers which have the Blue Chip M120/10 stock number, but are instead an inferior printer called the CPI-80 (Computer Peripherals Inc.). Apparently, Blue Chip could not get the real item from Japan in time for their marketers to meet their advertising deadlines, so the other similar printer was sub- stituted until the real ones arrived. The true Blue-Chip printer is Characterized by a set of slide switches under a small cover on the top (outside) of the printer, while the CPI-80 has these functions buried on a DIP switch deep inside the printer. The manual with the CPI-80 is vastly inferior, and I suspect the printer is too (for one thing, the char sizes are quite a bit smaller than normal). Any details I left out? Send questions via net mail to me: Frank Prindle Prindle@NADC.Arpa