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Testing the ruggedness of the Proton

THE latest product from the TVS Electronics stable is the Proton; a dot matrix printer that TVS-E claims is the world's quickest bill printer.

As eWorld spoke to Gopal Srinivasan, Director at TVS-E, it was clear that there was an immense pride in the organisation that designed the printer from scratch.

And, why not? If things work out, the Proton could well be the first printer from India to be exported to Japan (TVS-E is currently in talks with some Japanese partners for this.) In which event, things would have come a full circle - the first printers that came into India were predominantly of Japanese make.

V. Sughosh, General Manager, R&D at TVS-E led the team that spent 18 months using feedback from prospective customers to design and build a product that would meet requirements.

Why does TVS-E claim it to be the quickest bill printer?

Says Sughosh, "Being quick does not necessarily have to mean only quick printing. It also means that the entire effort to print a bill takes lesser time. Which means that the paper feed and paper ejection must be fast too, in addition to more characters being printed per minute."

He adds that increased transfer rate from the PC, print head firing frequency, paper feed rate, and with a metal ripper provided to facilitate quick tearing off of the bill, all contribute to the speed of producing bills. In industry jargon, it means that the printer is worthy of comment as to the Bills per minute (BPM) rather than Characters per second (CPS).

TVS-E claims that the printer prints 10 bills per minute (at 5 items per bill), making it 20 per cent faster than any other transaction printer.

The other contributor towards cost savings comes in the form of an ink bank within a cartridge.

Every time the ribbon runs out of ink, instead of changing the whole ribbon, it is enough if the user changes the ink bank - which is detachable from the ribbon set-up.

Each bank costs Rs 45 and can be changed thrice before the whole cartridge changes for a cost of Rs 99. Sugosh claims that customers could save up to Rs 1,000 per year on this count.

According to Srinivasan, "This launch is part of our e-appliance strategy." TVS-E has products to suit retail customer requirements in the areas of point of sale computing products, uninterruptible power supply systems, language products and keyboards.

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