This is an interesting option if you're thinking about getting yourself a printer, but are a bit wary of splashing out hundreds of pounds on a full blown, letter quality printer.

The GP50S is styled along the game lines as most of the Seikosha range, but scaled down a little. It is a dot matrix compatible with the ZX81, Spectrum and the USA Times/Sinclair machines. In other words, it plugs straight into the peripherals port at the rear of the computer, with no need for an interface of any sort, just like the old ZX Printer.

Setting it up was nice and easy, the manual is well produced and the illustrated instructions were very simple to follow. The first problem that I encountered came as I plugged the printer into my Spectrum's edge connector. The lead connecting the printer to the computer is hardly six inches long, and though the manual has a nice picture of the printer sitting side by side with the old rubbery Spectrum, my old machine is housed in a LO-Profile keyboard which is all of four inches wider than the original keyboard. As a result, it was physically impossible to have the two units side by side, there was no room to have them sitting back to back on my workspace, so the printer had to be moved around so that it was facing a fairly awkward angle. I think that an extender cable is probably de rigeur if you're going to buy this printer.

Once hooked up, the GP50S seemed to work perfectly well. There's no additional software required, all the Spectrum's built-in printer commands, LLIST, LPRINT and COPY worked perfectly, and it handled graphics characters without any problems.

When I tried some word-processing using Tasword 2, I encountered a problem with carriage returns, due to the fact that Tasword uses 64 characters per line, which is fine if you're using a full size printer, but the GP50S can only print 46 characters on its 5" wide paper. As a result, the printer was throwing up question marks after every 64th character.

I assumed that this problem could be solved if I just found the necessary control code, and rang DDL's technical guys for help. The initial response was "you're not trying to use it for serious word-processing, are you?" No, of course I wasn't - the simple narrowness of the paper makes it unsuitable for that - but I did feel that it was worth trying it out just for experiment's sake.

Now, although the GP50S may not be up to any serious word processing, I honestly don't think you can hold that against it. Certainly none of its competitors in the under £100 range can claim to be suitable for that task ether. And if you're going to compare the GP50s performance with that of any of the other printers in that price range, then it will probably win hands down. At £69 plus VAT, it's more expensive than the Alphacom 32 (£55) and the same price as the Floyd 40, but is more versatile and, being a dot matrix printer, rather than thermal, it has a much better print quality.

It's not as versatile as the Epson P40, which has a variety of fonts, and allows command codes for enlarged, condensed and bold characters, whereas the GP50S is by DDL's own admission fairly unsophisticated and only allows about half a dozen control codes to be entered. What these do, I'm not quite sure about, as there's no mention of them anywhere in the manual. However, the GP50S is £30 cheaper than the P40.

So, if you want a fairly simple but reliable printer that isn't going to set you back £100+, and just want it for listings, screen dumps and informal letters and notes (rather than high quality letters), then I think that the GP50S is probably just what you want (but don't forget the extension cable).

The Seikosha range is handled in this country by Data Distributors Limited, 5 Kings Rise Park, Ascot, Berkshire.