David Williams finds a daisywheel printer for less than £300

A daisywheel printer for under £300? Impossible, I can hear you saying, but the Silver Reed EXP 500 is a dedicated daisywheel printer, which can be connected to most micros with a parallel or serial printer interface, and it costs just £299 for the former and £349 for the latter.

The model I tested was provided with a parallel interface and worked with the BBC Micro.

The printer comes in a sturdy cardboard box with the inevitable moulded polystyrene packing. The basic machine is supplied with a Courier 10-pitch daisywheel, a carbon multistrike ribbon cassette and a power lead, but no plug.

The printer is light grey with a smoked plastic printhead cover, which also acts as a barrier for the unwary fingers since a microswitch under the cover automatically turns the machine off if it's opened.

The instructions are contained in a glossy 27-page book which makes setting up and getting it going no great problem. Care must be taken to take off all the packing and to remove two screws located in the base of the machine which hold the carriage in place.

The controls are simple, with an on/off switch located at the rear of the machine immediately above the power cord. On the front of the machine are four buttons, clearly labelled for On Line, Line Feed, Form Feed and Top of Form Set. Three LEDs warn you of the machine's state of play.

Under the cover immediately behind the front control panel are five DIP switches used to change the printer's printing modes. One switch controls the length of Form Feed. Disappointing, since you only have the option of 11 or 12 inches. Two of the switches allow a configuration for different print wheel pitches, 10, 12 or 15 cpi. The fourth switch turns a line feed on, carriage return on or off, and the fifth switch is to set the printer in either serial or line mode.

After switching on you can generate a self test of the operating system which produces Figure 1 (below).

As you can see, the daisywheel supports a full character set including super and subscript, and computer characters such as [ and ].

A feature on the machine is the ability for it to print in bold face, underline and limited graphics.

Once I had placed some text into the computer I was ready to go. My first impression was the relatively quiet performance. Although obviously noisier than a dot matrix, the EXP 500 is considerably quieter than many other printers I have come across, including some costing many hundreds of pounds more.

Inserting paper into the machine is easy, as is lining it up properly. Touching the Form Feed, however, is an unforgetable experience. It is extremely vicious and the paper shoots out of the top of the printer. The platen was a little stiff, but that's no bad thing and it will probably ease up with use.

The printer works bi-directionally when in the line input mode and uses a line buffer. Serial mode, however, gains access to all the control codes within the machine and underlining is simply performed by inputing X number of backspaces followed by X number of characters. There is a Basic program provided within the manual for you to put this to the test, as well as one to try out the type, since that works on a similar principle to the underline.

Three daisywheels are available for use with the EXP 500, in 10-pitch, 12-pitch, and 15-pitch, the pitch being the number of characters per inch. The recommended typefaces on the wheels are Courier 10 and 12 and Gothic Mini 15. These particular daisywheels are Diablo compatible and have the required characters on them to operate most word processing programs, such as Wordstar.

However, I tried out other daisywheels from the same manufacturer which I use on my typewriter. Figure 2 shows the results.

Some of the characters don't print, and others come out with surprising results. However, all the normal alphanumerics appeared to work all right, so for printing letters etc you do have a wider choice of print options.

The quoted speed is 14cps but the print style, as is to be expected on a daisywheel, is clear and precise and using it will give you a far better print than even the most sophisticated dot matrix printer. At the price of £299 from C/WP Computers, the EXP 500 is unbeatable.