KX-1624                    24-pin printer
24-Pins for the Price of 9
 
Panasonic has announced a wide-carriage printer that has a sug-
gested retail price of less than $699.95.
 
The KX-P1624 features front-panel programming, four paper paths,
paper parking, and a "perforation-cut" function. It prints in
draft mode at up to 192 cps (characters per second) using two
resident fonts (Pica and Elite) and prints near-letter-quality at
63 cps using five fonts (Courier, Prestige, Bold PS, Script, and
Sans Serif). The 1624 also will print graphics at 360 by 360 dpi
(dots per inch). The internal buffer is 12K, expandable to 44K
with a user-installable 32K-byte memory option.
 
The printer has paper paths in the front, rear, top, and back.
The flat-belt tractor can push or pull paper (and switches easily
from one to the other); as with most printers, friction feed is
used for cut sheets. With paper parking, tractor feed paper is
rolled back and out of the way when a single cut sheet is fed
into the printer. The perforation cut feature advances forms for
tearing off, then rolls them back into proper "top-of-form"
position.
 
The programmable front panel lets you select font, pitch,
margins, page length, and lines per inch using a membrane pad.
You can select options from a front-panel display and save them
to macros. The front panel also eliminates internal DIP switches:
all printer set-up, including emulations (for Epson LQ-2500 and
IBM XL24E), is performed using the keypad. Another front panel
option puts the printer into quiet mode, which is half as noisy
and about half as fast, according to Panasonic.
 
Price: $699.95; 32K expansion, $60.
 
Contact: Contact: Panasonic Office Automation Group, Two
Panasonic Way, Secaucus, NJ 07094 (800) 742-8086.
 
                              --- Roger K. Adams
 
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