Citizen Europe Ltd has launched a pocket sized ink-jet printer designed for the Personal Digital Assistant market. The Citizen PN60, which weighs just over 1 lb and is about the size of a flashlight, will print colour or mono reproductions at 360 dots per inc depending on the cartridge used. Citizen says the printer’s competitive edge lies in the fact that it has a customised Windows driver that produces sharper and more vivid colour reproductions than other printers. It achieves this through Citizen’s customised software that controls the amount of ink released onto the paper. Although it will retail at UKP350 Citizen says that users will benefit from long term savings because the print cost per page is seven pence compared with Epson Corp’s inkjet equivalent which costs 1.8p per page and Hewlett-Packard Co’s which costs 2.7p per page. The printer has a a built-in Macintosh Compatible Serial RS422 Port, a built in parallel port and built in RS 232 Serial Port to enable Windows personal computer, Macintosh or palm top compatiblity and uses a 16-bit NEC Corp iAPX-compatible V series processor. It also has a direct current Input to enable users to plug into an alternative power supply. The battery will print 60 pages before needing to be recharged; recharging takes six hours. According to Citizen’s sales and marketing director, Edward Huggins, the PN60 is three years ahead of its time and will only gain commercial success when the market for Personal Digital Assistants takes off, until then it will be a niche product for the value-added reseller world.
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