Last year I upgraded to a 24-pin dot-matrix. I noted that the Citizen ProDot 24 (formerly at £699 plus VAT) was being sold off at around £300-£350 but careful perusal of the adverts showed that Watford Electronics (and a few others) were selling them for around £210 plus VAT. So I had one of those!

Being the tail-end of the production line, it was no surprise that it would not switch on when it arrived, but it was quickly returned and exchanged for one that did. Since then the fault has occured again but a phonecall to Citizen confirmed that it carries a two year manufacturer's warranty and so could be dealt with by their local repair agent.

The printer has four fonts built in, with further ones being downloadable or on plug-in cards.

As is to be expected from a professional machine, it can simulate Epson, NEC or IBM and can accept parallel or serial inputs.

Its printing capability is so versatile that it would take a long article to go through it.

It has a 24K input buffer and there are two built-in test routines.

The only disadvantage, as with most 24 pin models, is the noise level.

For a printer driver, I use one of two in the PMS NTQ system. The NTQDRV2 allows any command to be passed to the printer if between the Highlight 1 and Highlight 2. This gives full access to the capabilities of the printer, such as font selection, pitch selection, line spacing, multiple height or width, etc, etc.

George Hersee

Will Watts, EUG #5