I have, um, a couple printers. Okay, make that five. There’s the Canon B/W inkjet I brought into work because I hated the color HP they gave me. Then there’s the Canon color inkjet that came with Wife’s computer, the Epson color that came with mine, the Epson color demo I bought to get the ink cartridges for ten bux, and the old Rat Shack dot matrix to hook up to the CoCo as well as to keep around Just In Case.
Inkjet printers are given away with new computers because, like razors, the manufacturers make their real money on the refills. I try getting around that by buying the bottles of ink, but end up with ink all over my hands and a printer that STILL doesn’t work very well. Their maintenance costs, both in time and materials, leave inkjet printers on the low end of sensible purchases. So screw it!
Now we are six. Those above and a dirty, old Epson LQ-500 dot matrix. I don’t need perfect printing for resumes or cover letters anymore and it’ll do 360x360 if I ask it to. It’s slow, but I don’t print out manuals at home. It’s louder than U2, but I can live with that. And ribbons are practically free (hell, I had one in the cupboard!) and are the same as for the MX-80, etc, so they should be the very last ribbons to go out of production.
Now, all I need are drivers to use the internal fonts for extra speed. Win 98 just seems to only like True-Type fonts, and listening to this punch out graphics is not pleasant. I always LIKED Epson’s Sans Serif and it can give my correspondence a distinctive, retro look.