Citizen ABC printer.
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£130 to £150. Widely available. Supplied with or without colour kit.

Ok its a bit of an old printer now  but  its still a current model and its
new to me. Possibly the last of the colour dot matrix printers as bubblejet
prices have fallen so much in recent months.

The whole concept of the ABC is  a  user-friendly,  easy to setup, easy to
use printer that has good basic results. Also  being dot matrix which is
tried and tested technology its reliable.

First impressions are bad. Its so ugly.  Its ok looking down on it but from
the front its got a bulbous  naff  sort  of look to it. Being Citizen its
all a bit plasticky and  light  weight.  They  don't build their printers
like Panasonic.

Feature wise its pretty good.  Theres  a  8k  buffer  (ok that bit's crap),
50 sheet autofeeder built  in  or  tractor  feed  option,  Plus  of course
theres colour. Its a 24pin printer and reasonably speedy.

The colour facility is basic and  slow.  I'm  not really happy with the
yellow output as its hard to see but then again  on white paper I suppose it
will be. I did a few screenshot printouts  and  was  reasonably happy with
the results. However the speed of doing this was very, very slow. Repeatedly
going over the same area hitting it with all four  colours  available on the
ribbon to create the full palette. I really think that  dot matrix printers
aren't suitable for printing colour images with lots of colours.  They're
best  left  to doing individual text in different colours or  charts  that
only have a few colours in. Bubblejets really wipe the floor with dot matrix
in this area.

Normal black print is achieved  with  the  ABC  as  either  a single black
ink ribbon or the colour ribbon has  a  black  section  at  the top with the
three colours below. Its a fine LQ printer.

The question  many  may  ask  is  why  people  buy  dot  matrix  printers
when Bubblejets are now so cheap.  Well  the  ABC  is still cheaper than
Bubblejets especially colour ones by a few  pounds.  Running  costs are much
cheaper. Its more durable and makes a good introduction  to printing to the
young who won't be as respectful to it as an adult.

The disadvantages are its slow and  not  very good for detailed colour
images. Its noisy. It looks like Fisher Price on a bad day.

You also get a PC and Amiga drivers disk but obviously this doesn't help
BBC users at all.

Mono print 85%
colour print 54%
Speed 70%
Running costs 95%
Bootability(Durability) 90%
Fashionable computer status symbol rating 4%

Buy it for a brat or if you're a tight fisted type.

Martin Wilson