The Sinclair ZX Printer is a

spark printer Spark printing is an obsolete form of computer printing and before that fax and chart recorder printing which uses a special paper coated with a conductive layer over a contrasting backing, originally black carbon over white paper but later alu ...

which was produced by

Sinclair Research Sinclair Research Ltd is a British consumer electronics company founded by Clive Sinclair in Cambridge. It was originally incorporated in 1973 as Westminster Mail Order Ltd, renamed Sinclair Instrument Ltd, then Science of Cambridge Ltd, the ...

for its

ZX81 The ZX81 is a home computer that was produced by Sinclair Research and manufactured in Dundee, Scotland, by Timex Corporation. It was launched in the United Kingdom in March 1981 as the successor to Sinclair's ZX80 and designed to be a low-cost ...

home computer. It was launched in 1981, with a

recommended retail price The list price, also known as the manufacturer's suggested retail price (MSRP), or the recommended retail price (RRP), or the suggested retail price (SRP) of a product is the price at which its manufacturer notionally recommends that a retailer ...

of £49.95. The ZX Printer used special wide black paper which was supplied coated with a thin layer of

aluminium Aluminium (aluminum in American and Canadian English) is a chemical element with the symbol Al and atomic number 13. Aluminium has a density lower than those of other common metals, at approximately one third that of steel. I ...

. To mark the paper, one of the printer's two styluses passed a current through a small area of the aluminium layer, causing the aluminium to evaporate and reveal the black under-surface. The printer's horizontal resolution was the same as the ZX81's video display, i.e. 256 dots (pixels) or 32 characters (using the standard character definition). The ZX Printer was never intended for word processing purposes, instead being aimed at users who wanted to obtain program listings for reference purposes. The ZX Printer was also compatible with the earlier

ZX80 The Sinclair ZX80 is a home computer launched on 29 January 1980 by Science of Cambridge Ltd. (later to be better known as Sinclair Research). It is notable for being one of the first computers available in the United Kingdom for less than a h ...

computer (when fitted with the 8kB ROM upgrade) and the later

ZX Spectrum The ZX Spectrum () is an 8-bit computing, 8-bit home computer that was developed by Sinclair Research. It was released in the United Kingdom on 23 April 1982, and became Britain's best-selling microcomputer. Referred to during development as t ...

, and plugged directly into the

expansion bus In computing, an expansion card (also called an expansion board, adapter card, peripheral card or accessory card) is a printed circuit board that can be inserted into an electrical connector, or expansion slot (also referred to as a bus slo ...

connector via a short cable. The expansion bus was duplicated on the outside of the printer's connector, allowing other peripherals to be connected concurrently. The printer drew its power directly from the expansion bus, and was sold with a larger (1-2 A) power supply for the ZX81 to accommodate the additional power drain.
Sinclair User - Printers The Spectrum's user manual noted that this was not needed for the Spectrum as its default 1.1 A power supply was sufficient. The peripheral was affectionately referred to during the 1980s by users in the UK home computing community (many of whom were teenagers) as 'The Astronaut's Bog Roll'
ZX Golden Years: 1983 - The invasion has begun ('bog roll' being common English vernacular for

toilet paper Toilet paper (sometimes called toilet tissue or bathroom tissue) is a tissue paper product primarily used to clean the anus and surrounding anal region of feces after defecation, and to clean the perineal area and external genitalia of u ...

, and the astronaut reference pertaining to the silvery, glittery appearance of the ZX Printer's paper). The printer itself also bore more than a passing resemblance to a 1980s-era toilet-roll dispenser, in terms of its visual design.

Competing printers

The Alphacom 32 was a

thermal printer Thermal printing (or direct thermal printing) is a digital printing process which produces a printed image by passing paper with a thermochromic coating, commonly known as thermal paper, over a print head consisting of tiny electrically heated ...

that used the same interface, and therefore could be driven by a ZX81 or Spectrum without additional software.ALPHACOM 32
USER’S MANUAL, PUB NR.: 017121-01 Unlike the ZX Printer, it had a separate power supply, and made use of standard thermal paper rolls which remain widely available.

References

External links

Planet Sinclair: ZX Printer

Penguin Books Penguin Books is a British publishing, publishing house. It was co-founded in 1935 by Allen Lane with his brothers Richard and John, as a line of the publishers The Bodley Head, only becoming a separate company the following year.comp.sys.sinclair FAQ: Peripherals: Printers
{{Sinclair computers and clones Computer-related introductions in 1981 Home computer peripherals Sinclair Research

Competing printers

See also

References

External links