In a show of commitment to the UK peripherals market, NEC (UK) Ltd has announced a new distribution strategy and more new printers, graphics boards and CD-ROM drives. From now on, NEC products will be available either from a select group of 250 direct dealers with another 1,250 dealers served by a sole distributor through 28 chain store outlets, or as a result of OEM deals. Dealers that deliver a consistent level of quality will be rewarded with credit assurances. The move is an attempt by NEC firstly to bring some stability to dealer profit margins, and secondly to create a more responsible peripherals market, which it says currently has a cavalier attitude to customer support. The new distribution method is further intended to gain NEC more exposure in corporate markets, particularly for products like those in its CD-ROM drive range, to which NEC has added two new models. The CDR-82 desktop and CDR-72 internal drives both have an average access time calculated at 400mS, a built-in 64Kb of cache memory, and a burst transfer speed of 1.5Mbytes-per-second as well as support for IBM AT, PS/2 and Apple Macintosh machines via the SCSI interface. Audio compact disks can also be played through both drives. The CDR-72 comes in at UKP600, the CDR-82 at UKP585. NEC is also marketing five new graphics boards: the 1,024 by 768 pixel Paradise VGA1024, aimed particularly at MultiSync 3D applications, comes in at UKP325; two 16-bit Genoa VGA and SuperVGA boards, offering 70Hz refresh rates and aimed at MultiSync 3D and 4D monitors, are priced at UKP380 for the IBM AT version, and UKP580 for the PS/2 version. For computer aided design applications, NEC is adding two Elsa XHR Gemini boards based on a 50MHz Texas TMS34010 chip; the Elsa boards support Windows and Ventura, and are claimed to be suitable for MultiSync 5D; the 16-colour Elsa XHR Gemini comes in at UKP2,000, the 256 version at UKP2,300. Several additions have been made to NEC’s printer range: the Colormate PS colour PostScript page printer offers 300dpi graphics from a set of 736 colours, printing on either A4 paper or transparency – based on the Motorola 68020 microprocessor, with a standard 8Mb of standard memory expandable up to 20Mb, the one page per minute Colormate includes 35 scaleable Adobe typefaces, and costs UKP8,300. Two new eight page per minute 300 dots per inch laser printers have also been launched: the Silentwriter 2-266 and 2-290. The NEC V50 chip-based 2-266 includes 1.5Mb of memory expandable to 5.5Mb, HP Laserjet emulation, four resident fonts and costs UKP2,000. The 68000-based Silentwriter 2-290 offers 2Mb of memory and Adobe PostScript as standard, with features including 35 scaleable fonts and an AppleTalk interface; the 2-290 costs UKP2,900. Finally, NEC has upgraded its P6 and P7 Plus matrix printers to perform at 300 characters per second in draft mode, and at 100 characters per second for letter quality; emulation cards and options to add colour kits and serial interfaces are incorporated in new printers, called P60 and P70 which cost UKP650 and UKP840 respectively.
