review of NEC Spinwriter, model 2010

[Henry Spencer]

Early this year, we bought a Spinwriter printer, made by NEC Information
Systems.  It was intended to supplement our "production" final-copy printer,
which is a bit cranky, doesn't produce ultimate-maximum quality, and is
quite hard to change back and forth from tractor feed to single-sheet work.

The Spinwriter series are print-thimble machines, like a daisywheel printer
but using a different physical shape of print element.  This attracted us
because the thimbles hold more characters than standard daisywheels, and
we'd had endless trouble with missing ASCII characters on daisywheel units.
The print speed varies from 20 cps to something like 55 cps, depending on
which model you buy.  The 2010 is at the low end in both speed and price.
Ours cost us about $1300 Canadian, with essentially no accessories.

Our experience with the Spinwriter so far has been very good.  It has
filled a long-felt need for a good way to do letterhead printing and
similar things without the hassle of putting the "production" printer
out of service.  It has been completely reliable, and the users have been
most satisfied with the quality of print.  It is not especially fast, but
large print jobs are generally done on the production printer anyway, and
the 2010's speed is quite adequate for what it's used for.

We run our Spinwriter as a self-service machine, controlled from a nearby
terminal.  Users do not change their own print thimbles -- we picked one
good thimble and simply decreed that as the standard thimble -- or ribbons,
but do change the paper.  They use both 8.5x11 and 14x11 fanfold paper,
and single sheets of various sizes.  We use friction feed, since this makes
it very simple to change between different types of paper.  It also means
that you have to adjust the paper occasionally when using fanfold, but
this printer is not normally used for large print jobs anyway.  At the
moment, the software is set up so that the user has to hit RETURN on the
controlling terminal after each page, which solves problems of paper
alignment and single-sheet feeding fairly well.

We do plan to get a tractor feed for the Spinwriter, but this is intended
as a backup for our troublesome production printer rather than as the
normal mode of operation for the Spinwriter.  We do not plan to get a
sheet feeder; local experience with sheet feeders has been, uh, not good.

It's difficult to say just how quickly the thing uses ribbons, because its
duty cycle is not all that high and we haven't gone through very many
ribbons so far.  The ribbons are a reversible type -- the printer only
uses half the ribbon width, and when it runs out, you flip the ribbon
over to use the other half.  We have experimented with flipping it over
again when the second half runs out, to re-use the used surface.  Print
quality is down a bit, but not too badly.  We would not want to use
the same surface a third time, though.  So far, we think ribbon life
is ample, especially using each ribbon twice.

The print thimble we are using is the "Elite-12/Multilingual-A".  This
has full ASCII, many useful special characters, and some other minor nice
aspects like having matched left and right single quotes.  Changing
thimbles is quite easy, although we have not done this to any extent.

We had a brief problem getting handshaking to the printer to work right,
but this seems to have been a cable problem.  The 2010 is prepared to
handshake either via extra RS232 lines or with xon/xoff protocol; we are
currently using the former but will probably eventually switch to the
latter.

The one difficulty we have had with the Spinwriter has been that thimbles,
ribbons, and accessories seem to be rather hard to come by.  It's not that
they cost a lot, but that distributors are often out of them.  It seems
that NEC has a reputation for slow delivery and long delays.  We stocked
up on replacement thimbles when we got the chance, although in fact we're
still on our first thimble.  If you are buying a Spinwriter, you should
probably check out local sources of supplies, and perhaps stock up a bit
yourself against the possibility of order delays.

In short...  Based on our experience with using a Spinwriter 2010 as a
low-duty-cycle high-quality self-serve printer, we highly recommend it.
Overall, we rate the 2010 as notably superior to the various daisywheel
machines that we've used in the past.
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry