A REVIEW of the STAR NX-1000 COLOUR PRINTER
                                                 by Dennis Purcell

            [Ed: see also the printing hint in "Readers_Hints" in
            FEEDBACK, and of course the "Print.Manual" article.]

            About five months ago Star released in Australia the NX-1000
 series of quality nine pin dot matrix printers. After initial shortages
 they are now readily available in most computer shops. Recommended retail
 price is $599 for the standard model, but for an extra $100 you can
 have the additional feature of COLOUR. For an Amiga owner, the colour
 version is the only way to go. [Note that the standard model CANNOT be
 upgraded to colour later.] The recommended retail prices are most
 definitely n egotiable, as I've seen the NX1000-COLOUR advertised
 for $556, including cable.

           The Star company has built up a commendable reputation for
 producing good quality but moderately priced Epson clone printers,
 notably the Star Gemini and the Star NX10. The NX-1000 series follows the
 same traditions but with the addition of colour, and a few other features
 that makes the printer a worthy successor to the NX10.

           The printer's main features are:-

1. Built-in Fonts.
   The printer has 1 draft and 4 NLQ fonts. The four NLQ fonts are
 Courier, Sanserif, Orator with small capitals, and Orator with lower
 case. All fonts can be selected as standard or italic.

2. Speed.
   30 cps in NLQ mode is pretty good, and 120 cps in draft is fast enough
 for me.

3. Print Pitch.
   The usual offering of Pica (10 cpi), Elite (12 cpi), Condensed Pica (17
 cpi), Condensed Elite (20 cpi), Proportional Pica and Proportional Elite.

4. Paper Parking.
   Paper parking is a neat system for quickly changing from the the usual
 fanfold paper (used say, for drafting a letter), to single sheet
 operation (perhaps an embossed letter-head sheet for a NLQ final copy),
 then back again to fanfold paper.
   A few simple controls rewinds the continuous paper, and when a single
 sheet in dropped down the paper guide, an automatic feed activates to
 advance the sheet to top of form ready for printing. When fanfold paper
 is again required, the printer simply activates the sprocket feed to
 advance the fanfold paper, and it's ready for printing again.
  This system avoids the usual problems associated with changing paper
 feed methods.

5. Soft Touch Control Panel.
   The four, coloured, soft touch controls on the front of the printer,
 together with the front mounted ON/OFF switch, gives the operator
 flexible control over most of the printer's functions. These include:
               *short self test and long self test
               *set draft or one of four NLQ typestyles, standard
               or italic
               *set the print pitch
               *generate a hexidecimal dump of all data being
                sent to the printer by the computer
               *line and page feeds
               *forward and reverse microfeed
               *set top of form
               *clear the buffer
               *set left and right margins.

6. Print Buffer
   An 8K buffer giving faster and smoother graphics printing  comes as
 standard.

7. Colour text printing.
   Standard text can be printed in black, red, blue, violet, yellow,
 orange and green.

8. Printer Control Codes
   If your word processor doesn't support printing in red or purple (few
 do) or printing in double high and or double wide text (the NX1000  can)
 then you couldn't do it without a great deal of bother. The clever people
 who developed the NX1000 devised printer control codes using the format
 "((X))n", which is typed directly into the text of the word processor.
 The printer recognizes the combination of characters as a print control
 code and executes a change in font, colour, text size, bold or italic as
 ordered. Very neat!!

9. The Manual.
   A comprehensive spiral bound manual with a fold out reference card
 fully explain all the printer's features. There is also a  handy User's
 Guide to keep on the desk.

10. Ribbons.
   Black ribbons cost around $12 and Colour ribbons around $24, so they
 are not very expensive and they last a lot longer than ribbons for
 thermal  printers.

11. Preferences.
   The printer is Epson compatible so under Workbench 1.2 select the
 "Epson JX_80" and under the new 1.3 Workbench use the "EpsonX" printer
 driver and the new PRINTER.DEVICE.

12 Graphics and Colour.
   Colour printouts from Deluxe Paint, ProWrite 2 etc take longer to
 produce than black and white because the print head needs four passes on
 the one line, printing yellow, red, blue and finally black, to produce
 all of the possible 4096 colours available. The new Workbench 1.3 is
 highly recommended for both the dramatic increase in speed of graphics
 printing as well as the additional graphics features available in
 preferences.


       The STAR NX-1000 COLOUR printer is a quality product with many
 useful features and at a price that makes it almost impossible to resist.
 For a first printer, or as an update for an ageing printer, I can
 recommend without reservation, this robust and clever printer.

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