Despite her tussels with the manual, Leah Batham still admires the CPA-80 printer's dozen dip switch options and its price - just £229

When the CPA-80 (Computer Mate 100) arrived in PCN's office the standard comment was: "Ah, another Shinwa Epson lookalike." From its original CP-80, Shinwa CTI has developed another possible winner, especially with a £228.85 price tag. It does, however, face stiffer competition than its predecessor.

The printer itself is a beige and brown plastic box about 5" high with an almost square footprint. It isn't small, but it is light. A semi-transparent 'smoked' plastic cover conceals the printing area. The paper feeds in the back from the wire paper guide and out through a slit in the top.

The review model has a parallel interface which accepted an Epson connector. A serial interface model is also available for an additional £23. Detailed specifications and circuit diagrams for both interfaces are contained in the manual.

The usual on-line, form feed and line feed buttons are provided in the standard Epson-style location - to the right of the printing area.

The CPA-80 takes single sheet or fan-fold paper. The tractor feed is unusual in that it feeds paper to the platen from behind rather than pulling it out from above. After the initial surprise, this proved easy to use and reliable. It also has the advantage that you can tear off a sheet without having to run the perforation through the tractor feed first, so you save on paper.

The printer ribbon is encased in a large cassette that slips into palce relatively easily. The one provided with the machine was a carbon ribbon which still hasn't run out, despite innumerable test-runs.

A flap on top of the machine, with the CPA-80 logo on it, conceals a collection of 12 dip switches. With the first seven switches it is possible to select normal or emphasised printing mode, form length, 1/8" or 1/6" line spacing, 80 or 142 character line length (the latter is for condensed mode), and a normal or slashed zero. The option to hardware select emphasised print is a particularly appealing feature.

Switches 8 to 12 determine the character set, which can be selected for a variety of languages. These can be combined with a range of graphics characters, the Japanese Kana symbols, the Greek alphabet or italic letters.

This is the CPA-80's weakest point though it could easily have been its strongest. The manual contains everything the user could possibly wish to know about every aspect of the printer, but it suffers severely from the common Japanese problem of inadequate grasp of the English language.

However, the fun stops when you try to wrestle some sensible information out of the gobbledegook. If it wasn't for the excellent diagrams I would never have been able to load the paper, let alone print out an article.

Almost every application described is accompanied by example programs in Basic. They must be adapted to the machine, but this usually isn't too difficult. Where language fails, these programs make up the deficit - an example others should follow.

Turning on the CPA-80 I noticed that the on-line light came on immediately. Like other printers, the default is on-line rather than off-line.

In operation the printer is relatively quiet and doesn't produce excessive vibrations despite its speed of 100 cps. The print quality is good, especially in emphasised mode.

All the dip switch controlled functions can also be software selected, making it possible to use several of the options in one document. In addition a vast array of different functions are available via control codes including: line spacing in increments of 1/216"; text format such as vertical and horizontal tabulation; enlarged, condensed, double-strike, Elite, Pica, underlined and proportional printing modes; superscripts and subscripts; and much more.

Both 8-bit and 9-bit dot image modes can also be selected, so graphics created on screen can with the right software be dumped to the printer. The 8-bit dot image mode can easily be switched from single density to double density. Unfortunately the sample programs in this section of the manual were slightly ambiguous and I couldn't get all of them to work.

The range of features on the CPA-80 would be impressive on a more expensive printer. At £229, it is good value. A prospective buyer should, however, store up a good deal of patience beforehand for debugging the manual.

Features 4/5
Documentation 3/5
Performance 4/5
Overall Value 4/5