NEW COLOR PRINTERS
Starting at $238by CHARLES JACKSON, Antic Staff Writer
If you're an Atari microscreen artist who feels you absolutely cannot
wait a moment longer to make color printouts affordably, then the Okimate
10 Personal Color Printer (Okidata, $238) or the Seikosha GP-700A
Color Graphic Printer (Axiom, $ 599) might be just what you're looking
for.
However... as you can see from the accompanying illustrations,
neither printer delivers color pictures that look as bright and sharp as
your video display. And we had to spend much of a workday tinkering
with the color registers of our sample file before getting any acceptable
results. Also, lettering with black ink was not as good as the Gemini
and Epson dot matrix printers we're used to.
But you can judge each printer for yourself. For our test
illustration we chose a microscreen sent to Antic by Jennifer Brabson of
Springfield, Virginia. On this page we show the Okimate and Seikosha
printouts, along with a photo of the actual video image and black-ink text
printouts.
OKIMATE
The Okimate 10 comes with a BASIC program that will make color printouts
from most Micro Illustrator and Super Sketch picture files. The program
can only be used with an 800 XL computer, or a 600 XL computer with a memory
expansion board. You'll also need a copy of DOS 2.0S.
The Okimate is a small, quiet thermal printer that prints 8"
x 5 1/4" color images on either single sheet. or tractor feed paper.
Once we loaded the program, it took 35 minutes to reproduce our sample
Micro Illustrator screen. You must choose colors carefully, if you
want your final print to resemble the original screen display. The
program can accurately represent only 15 of the Atari's 128 available colors.
Okidata technicians said a 128-color version of the printer
program would be available later this year.
The printer's "once through" color ribbon cartridge ($6.69)
contains enough ink for about five microscreen prints.
SEIKOSHA
The Seikosha is considerably larger, noisier and more expensive than
the Okimate-but it runs five times faster. The Seikosha took only
seven minutes to print our sample 8" x 5 1/4" color image, and two minutes
to generate a 4" by 2-5/8" image.
The Seikosha accepts MicroPainter, Graphics Master, Graphics
Magician and any other 62-sector Graphics 7.5 or Graphics 8 picture file,
and can be used with any Atari computer having at least 48K of memory.
The Seikosha's rewindable ribbon cassette holds four small inking
cartridges. When a color is used up, only its cartridge need be replaced.
Manufacturers claim each ribbon cassette can print the equivalent of 500
full-page letters.
OKIMATE 10
Okidata Corp.
532 Fellowship Rd.
Mt. Laurel, NJ 08054
(609)235-2600
SEIKOSHA GP-700A
Axiom Corp.
1014 Griswold Ave.
San Fernando, CA 91340
(800)232-9466
(213) 365-9521