kscott@cgl.ucsf.edu (Kevin Scott) (03/12/91)
>Seikosha has been advertised (mail-order) at $210.00 >Yeah, it's dot-matrix, but you can't sneeze at that price. >will post the results at=fter I've had a chance to try one out. My sister got one and I had an opportunity to check it out thoroughly. I didn't thoroughly read the manual though, so I can't make a perfect review, nor did I use a stop watch. To do a Consumer Reports style review, I would prefer to compare two new machines, not a used imagewriter to a new seikosha Cons: 1) slower. This does not affect me as much when I am printing something long, even with my imagewriter I dim the screen and walk away fo a while if I am doing something that takes more than two pages. The comparison was made at the highest quality mode, I did not compare fastest printing speeds. When printing letters this will be more of a problem, a user will actually have to wait for a single page to come plodding through the machine. There was one complication with printing long documents (I printed out a copy of my thesis, graphs and all), 2) more frequent paper jams. This is probably my fault, the problem went away when I placed the printer on a table, up off the floor, and the sheets had a clearer path into the printer and gravity helped pull them out of the printer. Paper quality is not negligible either, the paper had not been used in a long time and the sheets at the top of the stack may have been more scuffed. 3) cheaper print head and ribbon design. The ribbon does not move with the print head, instead one long strip of ribbon stretches from one side of the printer to the other. I do not know how this will affect the longevity of a ribbon, I imagine those who print infrequently will find that their ribbons dry up before they are used up. Ribbons might be harder to find for some people, unless they know of mail order houses such as mei (I still buy mei ribbons, but would no longer recommend their 800k floppies, (800)634-3478). 4) Color printing is not available. Imagewriter II's may use special colored ink ribbons. The color isn't for printing images, but it is invaluable when color graphs are desired, or for printing ledgers with negative values in red ink. Pros: 1) The print quality was perfectly acceptable to me. Just looking at the sheet of paper I found it pleasing and knew I could work with it. It wasn't perfect, but it was plus or minus 4 percent of an imagewriter. I did a side by side comparison with imagewriter output and found the seikosha to have more perceptible jaggies on large fonts. I am not saying there were more jaggies, the imagewriter output I had on hand was from an older ribbon than I realized, I was comparing light grey outbput to solid black (the new seikosha of course had a new ribbon). The difference, if any, was negligible to me; I have access to laserwriters for any printing where letter quality is important and like an imagewriter at home for convenience. Once again, I did not compare fastest printing qualities. Nor do I have a copy of ATM for home use. 2) The weight is noticably lighter. This is minor, how ofetn does one move the printer? But it is appreciated. 3) Two year warranty. 4) $ I do wish I'd seen the seikosha before I purchased my imagewriter. Overall, I am quite satisfied with my short experience with the printer. The biggest hurdle is often fear of the unknown, now that I have used the printer I would not hesitate to buy it the next time I considered a new or used imagewriter. The new apple printers were not on the market when the seikosha was purchased, however. In my humble opinion, Kevin Scott kscott@locke.mmwb.ucsf.edu