Meh. Good condition, works well. Nice keyboard. Can use fax rolls –handy when the ribbons are not available. Seems quite well made, too. Here is the users’ manual: http://djg.altervista.org/downloads/typewriter-manuals/Canon-Typestar-90-7II-User-Guide.pdf.
One of the earlier Typestars, so does not have a huge array of symbols nor a large memory to store many files and pages. On the other hand, heavier than later Typestars, it feels more solidly constructed and seems to be made of nicer plastics, if that is not an oxymoron.
Can use various fonts, but I think they are stored in cartridges, of which I have none. Courier is built in.
Hardly a collectors’ item, of course, but one of the nicer examples of its kind.
DSPACE 
Thanks for the article! I’ve been looking at getting one of these off of eBay, but I’m curious to know – does this machine have more than one typestyle/font, and if so, are they all built-in or do they come on swappable cartridges like some of the other Typestars? Thanks. :)
Hi ebeecee
The capabilities of these things vary from model to model. _To my knowledge_ (which is limited — you probably know better than I do), the later ones do have a few fonts. The earlier ones do not. The 90 is an earlier model. It’s in storage at the moment, but I have a feeling it does not have italics — maybe just underlines for emphasis. It does have a cartridge slot, I’m pretty sure. It feels better made than the later ones, but has fewer capabilities.
If you want a thermal printing battery-driven typewriter, the other ones I have played with are the Brother EP-44, which is also a printer and serial terminal (!) and can store a few thousand characters (which if you know how you can either print later or send to a desktop computer), and the Casio Casiowriter cw-16, which has a lot of special characters and quite a lot of memory. Neither has extra fonts, though. There are many others mini thermal typewriters. Check out: https://munk.org/typecast/?s=wedge
Thanks for the help! I haven’t been able to find any information on the cartridge capabilities of the Typestar 90 anywhere online, strangely enough. I got in touch with an eBay seller, who’ll hopefully let me know soon.
Thanks for the info on the others, too. I’ll have to look up what else the market had to offer back then!
I know that the type 90 could have extra memory cartridges. I have a manual somewhere … scanned it, and here: http://djg.altervista.org/downloads/typewriter-manuals/Canon-Typestar-90-7II-User-Guide.pdf. That’s all I got!