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The Sato line-up of printers has been extended to inlude "Enhanced" versions of familiar printers. Currently, the CL400, CL600, M8400RV and the M84S modular printers have been given the Enhanced treatment.

Although the mechanics and appearance of the new generation printers remain mostly unchanged, significant changes to the control circuitry and internal programming have resulted in Satos fastest ever printers, boasting rapid download and transaction times. The printers have all been given the new "E" suffix to produce the CL408E, M8400RVE, etc.

Sato's new emphasis on speed can be summarised by their own marketing slogan:

"More Memory + Faster Label Download + Faster Compiling = Faster Throughput!"

We investigated the differences between the old CL400 Series and the new Enhanced versions. Details of some of the enhancements follow:

  E is for...

Extras! The new Enhanced printers offers several new features. Support for the Euro symbol has become standard, as well as an emulation mode that allows the printer to imitate Zebra and Datamax printers.

The traditional LCD display panel has been replaced with a new improved version, offering multilingual support and a scrolling feature for displaying more detailed information. Support for emerging technologies has also been built in - two colour direct thermal printing and in-line encoding of embedded RFID tags will both be possible in the future.

 E is for...

Electronics! All of the Enhanced printers are based on the latest RISC Microprocessor with an SH3 processor (as opposed to the old SH1 processor). A comparison can be seen below. Further speed improvements are gained as the printer internal programming is shifted from Flash Memory into SDRAM at power on, allowing high speed memory access.

	CLOCK RATE	MEMORY	PROGRAM
SH1 (Old)	20Mhz	DRAM 2Mb	EPROM 512K
SH3 (New!)	80/133Mhz	SDRAM 16Mb	Flash Memory 2/6Mb

 E is for...

Efficiency! Further improvements include the use of a common PCB - one main control board for all the new Enhanced models. A whole range of communications interfaces is also available:

- IEEE 1284 High Speed Bi-directional (parallel)
- USB (up to 12 Mbit/s data transfer)
- RS232 (up to 57600 bit/s)
- RS422/RS485
- LAN/TCP-IP Protocol/10-100 Base T/Twinax-Coax

All of the new features would give a typical communications speed increase in the CL408E of up to 45 times! Graphic editing speed will increase up to 12.5 times, and format editing will increase up to 7 times!