quoth Printer (computing) - Wikipedia :
It seems intuitively reasonable to me to assume that something as mechanically simple as this, not limited by oligopolies, patents and know-hows and working with low cost ink would print ASCII or Cyrillic text for pretty darn cheap. The above quote seems to concur. So why don’t they use such machines for on-demand printing of documents that contain no graphics and no additional fonts?
Please put brain in gear before placing hands on keyboard.
Line printers ARE used for such things (like invoices). But those type of documents […no graphics and no additional fonts?] are rare, and getting rarer - or haven’t you noticed.
what if they are getting “rarer” because OfficeMax is not offering to print them for half or third of the price of a document with all the font bells and whistles from the laser printer? Even if for some applications, like small runs of vanity press or newspaper/magazine type publications, you just don’t need any fonts beyond upper casing of letters.
I swear you need to get a summer internship with me at the pharmaceutical manufacturing facility for the summer or someone like me. Most of your questions would explain themselves in just a few weeks in a working environment.
We don’t use any dot matrix printers. The reasons are that cost per page isn’t very important when the products we make cost a lot of money, they aren’t very flexible in what they can produce, end users don’t often know how to fix them themselves (very important), and the end result often looks unprofessional to the companies receiving the product.
Some companies do use them if money is an issue but again, you are strong on the technical curiosity and low on the business reason curiosity young Jedi. That isn’t good but lots of IT types fall into that trap. It is a service industry so you do what the business types want you to do in general especially in terms of printing because it is something everyone can see. The printing business is big bucks to lots of companies and everything that goes into those decisions is made by groups with smart people with different goals. Lowest cost per page is not usually at the top of the list when a major failure on one of our production printers for less than two hours can cost literally tens of thousands of dollars.
Taking a quick look online at Office Max (where my small business would go for a new printer). A dot matrix printer is about on par, pricewise, with a (decent) laser. Around $300. I’m sure the ink is cheaper, but I’m willing to bet dot matrix printers are still much slower then lasers when it comes to printing. I can’t have my driver write a bunch of invoices and then sit there checking facebook while they print when my laser printer can print them in a matter of seconds. Besides, we need our laser printer for so many other things.
As others have said, in today’s world, unless you need a dot matrix printer it just looks unprofessional and the only place I can think of where you need one is if your invoices are printed in duplicate/triplicate.
And don’t forget the noise. These things are NOISY.
Shagnasty, sure, internship would be great. Will probably pay better than my current freelancing and be more interesting as well.
Back to the line printers. A line printer is not “dot matrix”. I am also not proposing to use it in those situations where, as you describe, there are bigger considerations than cost per page. But surely there must also be cases where cost per page is the issue? When I am printing a fanfic magazine, high school catalog or corporate harassment policy brochure over at Kinko’s / OfficeMax, what considerations other than cost would I consider?
Additionally, notice that price considerations may be different between various ASCII using countries. E.g. Mexico, Nigeria and Vietnam are fairly poor places that use ASCII, so maybe they would be less snobbish about lack of italics, bold and pictures. With India it may be more difficult because it seems that Devangari alphabet has ligatures.
Not to mention, of course, that the next step would be to build a clever hybrid system that would in fact do the bells and whistles using alternative technologies while doing the bulk of the printing using the cheaper technique.
ETA: from wikipedia article, about speed: Line printer - Wikipedia
From your own link “The limited character set, fixed character spacing, and relatively poor print quality make impact line printers unsuitable for correspondence, books, and other applications requiring high print quality.”
I think that answers your question. They seem to still be used for internal stuff (book keeping, labels for boxes going into storage, pick stickers for wholesalers sending things out to customers etc) but beyond that the quality just isn’t good enough.
Because it often looks like this.
It’s ugly and looks unprofessional, it’s not really THAT much cheaper, it’s noisy and it’s slow. In most places you’ll find them they’re a holdover from earlier days and it just never made sense to upgrade.
Your mechanic or the joint that changes your oil/tires probably uses one for your invoice. In an environment like this they’ve probably been using the same billing system forever and it doesn’t make sense to upgrade because no one is concerned about print quality.
Another area is for internal reports of a company that will never see the light of day outside the office. Again, probably a holdover and why pay to fix something that ain’t broke.
However in today’s world of cheap laser printing it looks like shit and makes a bad impression if you’re going to share it.
What I can think of off the top of my head:
Flexibility. Character set is limited to whatever’s loaded in the drum, chain, etc. That was always a limitation of impact printing. All of the control over font, leading, kerning, ligatures, etc. is gone. That’s okay, as long as you don’t need design elements for readability in your documents. That’s not okay if the person in charge of buying the printer didn’t choose a good readable typeface for the job. You’re stuck with that unless you want to shell out for a different piece of hardware to produce different output. For anyone who does international business, this is an automatic disqualifier since you’re stuck with one and only one character set.
Noise. Impact makes noise. Unavoidable, no matter what the actual form of impact is.
Mechanically simple doesn’t mean it’s unbreakable. If it breaks, and it’s an unusual design, service is going to be a problem. Laser printers are probably even more mechanically simple since there only needs to be a drum for toner transfer, and a paper feed. Line printers add in type and an impact mechanism to the paper feed. I’m not an engineer, but I’d bet that the laser printer has fewer moving parts and therefore fewer possible points of mechanical failure.
Speed. The three limiting factors in a laser printer on output speed are first processing time, the time it takes to paint the image on the drum, and lastly paper feed time. The first can be improved with software, the latter two are probably about as optimized as a line printer’s mechanics. Whole-page printing is probably as fast or faster for a fast laser printer than for a line printer, and you have the ability to do typefaces and graphics.
Line printers are probably best for the applications they’re still used for: repetitive printing, low or fixed output form, high-volume, low-quality output.
yeah, that looks ugly. It also looks like it does not support both lower case and upper case letters, and character spacing seems excessive.
Is that the best that this technology was believed to be capable of? Or did they just never try getting better because let’s say Xeroxing was considered cheap enough for the small run printing jobs?
What does Xeroxing have to do with this and what do you mean by not supporting both upper and lower case?
They are primarily used at the mechanic and such not as a holdover, but because they need a printer that can print their invoices on carbonless copy paper (NCR) and laser/inkjet printers can’t do that.
Excellent point.
I think you are confusing line printer with dot matrix. A mechanic or oil change place might have a dot matrix printer, but a line printer is high-speed and high-volume.
One model from printtronix costs about $10,000, for example.
Yeah I think you’re right, I read line printer and thought of impact printers in general.
ok, well, the printronix.com website is heavy on BS and very light on the straight dope. Couldn’t even find a printout image explicitly from a line printer.
The $10K price quoted by RaftPeople is kind of surprising. When a system is that expensive, one has to wonder if they are either gouging or else for whatever reason failing to make a significantly cheaper version with some trade-offs.
They don’t mention whether or not these printers can print diacritic signs, such as in Vietnamese (maybe also Turkish, not sure). So probably they cannot, which suggests a market niche for a new entrant.
On second thought, maybe this whole line of reasoning of mine in this thread is going into the wrong “road less traveled”. If I am interested in finding ways to save on ink/toner during printing, maybe the best solution is to take the laser printer / xerox as the basic system and then try to figure out why the toner is so expensive for it nowadays, instead of exploring these exotic other printers that use cheaper ink. Here I will note that the Toner - Wikipedia article says:
In other words, it used to be that this toner thing was dirt cheap. Now we have more advanced high quality laser printers with more advanced, high priced toner. But if we want to trade off quality for price, maybe it would be easier to just go back to systems similar to those early printers and their dirt cheap toner.
Which of course brings me back to the question I have asked in the parallel thread - why aren’t new entrants in the laser printer market making stuff for market niches not well served by the current oligopoly that thinks that everybody is so darn rich that they should be paying through the nose for extra bit of print quality.
I’m confused. What are you getting at with this thread? ISTM, the whole point of this thread is that you’re suggesting that we take a flying leap back 20 years in terms of print quality in order to save money on printing. The thing is, I don’t think many people want to do that. Yeah, toner is expensive, but the quality is soooo much better then it used to be, it’s way more then worth it. Printing for the vast majority of the people that print just isn’t that expensive. For my business a cartridge costs about $100 and like I said, that’s expensive, but it lasts 3 months and it does things that we couldn’t do with impact printing. Our invoices would look awful, signs in the store would have to be made by hand etc.
In my mind, it would be like asking someone if they would like a 50 inch plasma HD/Blu-ray 1080P TV for $3000 or a 12 inch black and white for $2000.
I’ll bet you could talk to 1000 random business, offer them free ink and line printing equipment for the next 10 years (assuming they were currently using laser) and maybe 10 of them would take you up on it.
More fun.
I actually own a drum from a CDC drum printer. It is an astonishing bit of engineering. It would cost thousands. It weighs an astonishing amount. Solid steel about 4 inches in diameter and two feet long. I remember the printer it came from. You could stand in front of it and you couldn’t see the print on the pages because it was streaming past so fast, it was one of those devices that was hard to get your head around because it was operating faster than your mind said it possibly could mange. It was the size of a couple of large washing machines. It ate multiple boxes of paper between reloads and would automatically open its huge maw to be fed when it ran out, with little men in while coats scurrying about to keep it sated.
However, a high end laser printer can print as any pages per unit of time easily. With the full flexibility we expect from a laser printer. Indeed because of the large font and wide spacing, the actual amount of text on a single page of fan-fold paper was not that great, and a cheap laser printer might actually beat a big line printer for useful text printed per unit time. The limiting element for laser printers was often the RIP engine, and they are getting faster as all compute is.
The point about carbon multiple printing is important. There are still niche areas where this matters, payroll especially. The ability to print inkless on the outside one of those carbonless impression multi-layer documents is something that will probably still be with us for some time.
I do remember a book that was typeset on a line printer. David Greis’ book on compiler construction. Museum page here. The text was pretty awful to read, but a very good book.
I have nothing against having decent print quality. Maybe we already know enough about the technology to achieve it using cheaper toner - such approaches may exist but remain unimplemented, or may be unknown but capable of being discovered by those so inclined.
In any event, I believe that there should be product offerings for all market niches, not just for the sexy ones that the suits in charge can somehow relate to. If toner costs $.02 per page, then 300 page book will cost $6 just for the toner. That’s a lot of money. And if we could cut down the price by a factor of 6, it would cost $1 for the toner, which is a lot less. Sometimes $5 is more valuable than extra print quality.
