Epson’s relentless efforts to capture a sizeable share of the East Africa’s printer market are impressive; the company has unveiled several marketing measures including extended warranties and recruiting more resellers to promote and expand coverage of its products. Since the LX-350 (dot-matrix model) printer was unveiled, it was paramount for us at tuvuti.com to test just how far the printer could stretch in terms of performance and thereafter present our informed review to our readers. I’d say it’s been quite an experience having the printer in our possession which gave us an ample opportunity to exploit all the goodies enclosed therein while on the lookout for its cons. It’s different from the usual set-up you’d expect on traditional ink-jet printers so we’d recommend going through the included simple but clear-to-the-point manual just in case.
The set-up isn’t rocket science, in fact the user manual does it all and there aren’t extra parts to attach besides the roll-paper-holder and the ribbon cartridge. First, you’ll need to attach the power cable and make sure either the serial or USB cable is properly attached to your computer depending on the cable you are using. After the drivers are correctly installed, everything else should be a breeze.
LX-350’s Control Panel
The control panel houses both physical command buttons and led lights that are used to portray various functions and occurrences. The font selection lights which consists of on, off and flashing lights indicates the currently selected font where– (off-on lights for high speed draft, on-flashing lights for draft, on-off lights for Roman and on-on lights for Sans Serif font). The next light from left after the font selection lights is the tear off (font) light that’s used to portray presence of a continuous paper in the tear-off position, immediately below is the tear off (font) button that’s used to advance continuous paper to the tear off position as well as feeding continuous paper backward from the tear off position. Other buttons include LF/FF Button that feeds paper line by line when pressed and released, Load/Eject Button for loading or ejecting single sheet of paper and the pause button that stops printing temporarily. Other lights include the paper-out light and the pause light.
Available Ports
Underneath are three ports; standard serial port, standard USB Port and standard parallel port. Connection cables are purchased separately as none is included in the package.
Our General Observation and Verdict of Epson LX-350 Printer
Epson LX-350 Printer has lots of features for your money, it brings out the fine prints of dot-matrix technology and important extras such as onboard font types. The design is compact compared to ink-jet rivals and can print on continuous, single sheets and special papers although we’d wished the roll-paper-holder could accommodate more single sheets. Continuous printing on single sheets without pressing the load/eject button resulted in off-margin print-outs which calls for extra seconds for the action, but printing on it’s on was impressively fast within the manufacturers specified 4 seconds per page.
Epson LX-350 dot matrix printer strengths
- Compact-attractive design and weighs about 4.1kg
- Power efficient
- Easy set-up process and integration
- Decent onboard features such as font types
- 3 optional ports (parallel, serial and USB interfaces)
- Speedy production of prints (about 4seconds) for a printer in its category
- Economical – high ribbon yield of 4 million characters
Epson LX-350 Weaknesses
- Connection cables are purchased separately
- The roll-paper-holder can only accommodate one single sheet at a time
- Pressing the load/eject button each time you’re printing a single sheet to position it correctly is kind of time consuming