Printers for SI splits

[Ed]

My club is looking to invest in a some new SI kit, and we're wondeirng what the best printers to get are. The SI thermoprinter is the obvious choice, since we'd probably use it mainly for small events, but some other battery-powered printer that may be more flexible would maybe be better - although would presumably require the whole thing to be connected via a notebook.

Has anyone any experience of using any miniprinter type printers with the SI kit?

[andy]

My club is looking to invest in a some new SI kit, and we're wondeirng what the best printers to get are. The SI thermoprinter is the obvious choice, since we'd probably use it mainly for small events, but some other battery-powered printer that may be more flexible would maybe be better - although would presumably require the whole thing to be connected via a notebook.

Has anyone any experience of using any miniprinter type printers with the SI kit?

The SI one is great as a standalone with a print station. Have heard that it's difficult/impossible to use it through a laptop, which would make it even more versatile

[kedge]

There was a rumour that the guys who wrote Autodownload were looking into writing a printer driver for the SI schools set thermoprinter so that it could be linked to a laptop, but so far nothing has appeared.

[redkite]

Pretty sure you can use through a computer. I will check and post up details as to how.

[eldroc]

I have just bought (well, my club has) a Zebra MZ320 receipt printer. This was about the only reasonably-priced 3" printer with its own battery, windows pnp driver and USB interface I could find.

We intend to use the printer with a netbook running AutoDownload, and I'm hoping that the combination can be used without an external electricity supply for coaching and small training events. It seems to work fine in my home office - we will be trying it out in earnest at a training event on 4th December.

[John-O]

The battery powered printers supplied by SI are intended to work with their Printstation. The printstation sends ASCII character data via a 9 pin serial plug. Most printers having this plug could probably read the data but such printers are now rare in the domestic market. The printstation can be programmed to send control codes to increase the font width and height but these codes may only work with some printers. The SI software needed to change fonts and headers and footers is awkward to use. The printstation will send data to our CBM1000 Partial Cut printers which we use with Autodownload but these really need a Paper Cut command which unfortunately is not offered as an option.

Our printer set came from SI with a Gebe printer but we have encountered a lot of problems with the formatting, which would often break up after printing a few rows. We discovered that this was due to the printstation sending data too fast for the printer to keep up. A firmware upgrade by SI made an improvement but we are still having some problems, most noticeably with Type 6 cards, which have recently caused the printstation to seize up. This may be a battery problem but batteries are quite expensive. About a year ago, we somewhat reluctantly, decided to buy another printstation, but we are using this with an Able 1310 printer. This is cheaper than the Gebe printer and appears to work much better. It has a much larger buffer, prints faster and takes larger paper rolls.

The main advantage of the "2 box" splits printer set is that it is very easy to set up and use. However, it has very basic functionality and seems very expensive for what it does. With the advent of netbooks with several hours battery life, the opportunity exists to create a "3 box" printer set using a battery printer and a download box which only requires the user to plug the kit together and run a file. This could mimic the basic functionality of the SI printer set, but the potential is there to offer additional features such as archive lookup and course checking with minimal or no configuration. A recent forum topic in this forum, OE zero configuration, shows what is possible. Should also work out significantly cheaper than an SI printstation set.

J

[Ed]

Thanks to all for the info. For simplicity we've gone for the SI kit as part of their training set: we may look to upgrade the printing at some point though, so good to know what's possible and to have some pointers as to what's worth looking at.