Citizen Has Another Little Helper
Sydney Morning Herald
Sunday March 29, 1992
WHEN it was released five years ago, the Diconix portable printer was revolutionary in its ability to liberate printer-dependant PC users from their desks. It was also great for stationary users who had no space for a standard desktop printer.
More recently, Canon's Little Squirt and other compact bubblejet printers have taken over as the preferred graphics and scaled fonts-capable portable printers. Quality is good, with the right kind of paper, but it costs about 27 cents to print a single page.
Now Citizen has an alternative, based on a brand new printing technology called thermal fusion.
Print quality is much better than 24-pin dot matrix and comparable with bubble-jets and lasers - honestly, I've seen it.
The printer - black and white only, as yet - produces clean graphics in sharp, dense black ink and will also print illustrations. Almost unbelievable is that the output is from a print engine 30 cm long, 9 cm wide and 4 cm high.
Overall it's about the same price as bubble-jet technology. The unit costs roughly the same, at $699 including the battery, with running costs roughly of 25 cents for a typical A4 business letter.
The printer will run off battery or mains. On a six-hour charge it will print about 25 of these typical letters - not terribly impressive. It will, however, charge while being used off the mains.
Only one big crunch requirement left - speed, and there's the rub. Output is about one page a minute, which perhaps is not such a bad thing. The more incentive users have not to print until absolutely necessary, the better it is for the trees.
© 1992 Sydney Morning Herald
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