The EP-44 unpacked in a lightweight printer producing results comparable to daisywheel printers.

John Lettice looks at a major advance in dot-matrix printing

The death knell may be sounding for daisywheel printers. And who better to sound it than Brother, the manufacturer of a range of high-quality daisywheel typewriters and printers?

The Brother EP-44 is a portable dot matrix printer typewriter, but from a technological point of view its salient feature is that its print head is 24 x 18, which makes 9 x 7 look fairly puny, and produces results comparable with expensive daisywheel printers. It's a quantum leap from the EP-22, and there's more of that on the way, with the Japanese currently working on super-high density print heads, and on printers that produce full colour with the aid of three-colour ribbons.

PCN reviewed the previous portable from Brother, the EP-22, last autumn, and the 44 is basically similar in design and use. It has just under 4,000 characaters of memory, its text editor has been cleaned up a little, and it's send and receive. This means you can use it as a typewriter, a printer, or a remote terminal. It's not a micro though - not quite yet.

Its launch stable-mate is the HR-5, which uses the same technology and emulates Epson printers. As you'll see from our photograph, the HR-5 is around half the size of an Epson, and incidentally can run off four U2 batteries. It would be perfectly feasible to tote it around with a Tandy or NEC portable for producing hard copy.

The secret of this new breed of printers is twofold. CMOS technology allows the EP-44 to store text in the same way as a lap portable computer does, without guzzling power. The thermal print head cuts down on the amount of power you use to actually make your mark on the paper. This either uses thermal paper to produce a creditable black image on the page, or burns a hole in a carbon ribbon for even better results. The density of the print head is great enough for the entire letter to be burnt out of the ribbon, rather than just a pattern of dots.

The trade off to achieve this print quality is the kind of paper you can use. The EP-44 did produce an image of sorts on standard office stationery, but it was fairly abominable, and for good results you've really got to use shiny-surfaced paper. Experimentation should identify some form of paper that will give acceptable quality and is at the same time of an acceptable weight, and for day to day communications the thermal paper will be more than adequate.

Virtually in step with the micro boom, printer prices have been going through the floor over the past year or so. A number of good quality printers have recently come on the market at around the £200 mark, and the HR-5, bidding at £178, is set to cause a minor earthquake here, even excluding its low weight and classy output.

It has optional Centronics or RS232 interfaces and is capable of dumping high- resolution graphics from the screen. It's a dead ringer for a first 'quality' printer for home micro users, who, for the first time probably, will be offered full 80 column printing.

The 44 is around the same size as a typewriter, and weighs about 2.5kg. You can type into it storing your output in memory, you can operate corrected printing, which prints 15 characters in arrears - 15 characters is the size of the LCD display - or you can use direct printing, where it operates just like a typewriter.

The keys are semi-calculator in nature, but are big enough for you to build up a fair old head of steam on them.

Incidentally, this article up to here represents the total capacity of the 44's memory.

So it's a matter of printing out your deathless prose, then clearing the memory for the second volume.

Those of you who've seen the EP-22 will notice that the black casing has been abandoned in favour of a grey and blue colour scheme. This is apparently for the benefit of the US market, not because the Americans are different from we decadent Europeans, but because almost everything in the US now seems to be made to look like a certain range of incredibly big machines, and Brother is no exception.

When used by itself as a word processor, the 44 allows you to insert or delete whole lines or single characters, and has a number of extra features which are accessed with the aid of the blue code key on the left of the space bar. You can switch on a sort of word wrapping routine by auto which starts a new line if it reads a space or a hyphen in the last six characters before the right margin. A strategically placed seven character work mucks this up of course, which is a pest.

Tabs and margins are set fairly easily by a combination of space bar and setting keys, and you can also centre text or range it to the right of the page. A second shift allows you to print a range of exotic letters and accents, and the machine has the integral calculator the EP-22 has.

Instead of looking on the EP44 as a printer or a typewriter, you could also think of it as a dedicated word processor. Such things are becoming more common - you could think of the Microwriter as one, and dedicated handheld spreadsheets are just starting to appear in the United States. So how does it shape up in this field?

The best way to judge this is to think about what you'd use it for. If you're writing on the move, sure you could be churning out the Great American Novel 3,700 characters at a time, but even so you'd probably want to make rough notes while you were writing, and you might even want to dash off a quick letter to the bank manager without having to print out your other text.

The EP-44 packed up.

This is where using the EP44 gets tricky, as it holds text in memory as one file. The only way you can split this up is by placing a number of stops - where the machine will stop printing until you tell it to carry on - in the text, then switching sheets of paper or switching between printer modes.

So if you were after mobile word processing, you'd probably find the 44 severely limiting quite soon. It would therefore be a mistake to think of it as a budget rival to the Tandy or the NEC, and it doesn't stand up as value for money unless you take its printing facilities into account.

The HR-5 uses the same printing system as the EP44, but its typeface is standard dot matrix style, rather than the flashy kind of output the 44 produces. It's based in a 9 x 9 dot matrix in text mode, and will handle 8 x 480 in bit image mode.

It measures a titchy 7" x 12" x 2.75", compared to 12" x 14" x 4" for an Epson MX80, and weighs about 3.75lbs without batteries. It'll take single sheets of paper or 30 metre rolls of paper which sit on a detachable - exceedingly so - spindle that hangs on the back of the machine. It takes a larger ribbon cartridge than the EP44, and has optional RS232 or Centronics interfaces.

We didn't have a manual for the HR-5 at first, and spent a fair bit of time wrestling with it to try to get some kind of output. The best we got at this point was garbage, but it was very pretty garbage, and the print quality was astonishing. Brother's UK service department was very helpful, however, and gave us a series of DIP switch configurations and a provisional manual. With these you can select RS232, bit length, parity, and any one of eight baud rates between 110 and 5600.

The dip switches themselves are tucked away inside the printer, under the right hand end of the ribbon. Once you have them set up to operate with your particular micro this should be no great problem, but tinkering about initially with an RS232 does have a tendency to be a bit like trying to tune into Radio Tirana, and the switches are positioned so that you need a pretty thin pen even to reach the little swine.

The working HR-5 is really quite an impressive piece of word, however, giving double width, reduced, enlarged, underlined and emphasised characters, together with superscript and subscript. Despite the problems we had it shows considerable versatility, and the Centronics interface version should work at least as well as pricier competitors.

Flip up the smoked plastic cover and you see a little of the works. The print head (between the two lugs are the front of the ribbon cassette) is pushed up against the paper by the metal bar running across the picture's centre.

It should be clear from what we've said above that there are disadvantages with the EP44 and the HR-5, but the crucial point about both machines is that the disadvantages are there for a very specific reason. Until very recently it just wasn't feasible to have a cheap battery-powered printer with anything like reasonable print quality, but using heat rather than impact to make a mark on the paper has circumvented this.

Granted, the kind of paper you can use is dictated by this approach, but with a little research you can find quality paper of a weight you could use for business stationery that is at the same time glossy enough to allow the carbon from the ribbon to adhere to it. And look at what you're getting - the EP44's print head is complex enough to take a highly ornate typeface (so ornate, in fact, that Brother is quite clearly guilty of showing off in its design!).

The terminal aspect is also important, giving you a facility to use the machine as a remote terminal, possibly sending and receiving information over the phone line, and the printer partially circumvents the problem of limited memory. The memory, incidentally, is probably low because of the high price of CMOS chips, and an extra 4K would put the 44 a bit too high pricewise.

Size is an important feature of the HR-5, and this could be an important consideration for situations where space is at a premium, but this and the slightly gimmicky battery power will tend to obscure its other advantages. The print quality is as clear as most daisywheels, and if RS232 is your bag there is a great deal of flexibility in terms of baud rate and general communications there. Take the £175 price into consideration and it becomes a printer you need a good reason not to buy.

Now the final interesting thing about both these beasts is that they're still very much an interim stage. They're substantial advances on current technology, but they carry in them hints of the sort of technology we're lisble to see in the future.

Printing technology will improve further until we have super-dense dot matric print heads operating on plain paper, and the number of moving parts will decrease to the extent that the main reason for the size of the printer will be the size of the paper.

And then we have the EP44, the electronic typewriter that is almost a micro. Plug in a Basic and 20K more memory and we'd have a very interesting little portable, with the added advantage of a pretty decent print out. And just a little bit more tinkering with the technology and we might have a real find on our hands.