Pushing Up The Daisies And Dot Marks The Spot
The Age
Tuesday November 28, 1995
RIP the daisy-wheel: today's wide range of printers includes traditional ribbon-based dot matrix, inkjet, thermal, laser and specialised dye-sublimation color machines.
JUST a few years ago, we were very limited in our choices of printed computer output. Most mainframe or mid-range computers used line printers, which used large volumes of low-quality continuous stationery. PCs had a choice of continuous stationery dot-matrix printers or A4 cut-sheet laser printers.
Nowadays the market can choose from traditional ribbon-based dot matrix printers, inkjet printers, thermal printers, laser printers and various specialised color printers using techniques such as dye-sublimation.
The major casualty has been the daisy wheel in its time it provided the highest quality. However, it was the least adaptable of the technologies and now rests quietly with CP/M, TRS-80s and other historic, early-80s memorabilia. The daisy wheel was the only low-end device to print fully-formed characters, everything else forms characters by generating arrays of dots although some of these are as small as 0.
005 mm in diameter. Each type of printing device available today addresses a particular market need, each has its advantages and weaknesses.
Prices of all types of printers continue to fall. Even a small, one-person office, a family or a SOHO business can often justify having more than one printer to satisfy different needs. Dot-matrix printers still offer the cheapest per-page cost. Most can use both continuous and cut-sheet paper. They excel where print quality is not an overriding concern and where a printer is mostly dedicated to a single job.
This technology is also the only one that handles multipart stationery, such as the delivery dockets used by courier companies.
Ribbons are cheap, often under $10 and last for hundreds or thousands of pages. Any form of quality printing is measured in minutes per page. On the other hand, they produce good throughput when used in a form-filling role, with only a few hundred characters printed on a page.
An indication of the continuing strength of the dot-matrix market is given by Epson's product list. Many years ago it produced the first consumer-level dot matrix printer the MX-80. In 1995 it still has 13 different dot-matrix models in its list. Several manufacturers have models of dot-matrix printers that can print in colour using special print ribbons, but their usefulness is limited to the fields where tonal range and accuracy are unimportant.
The next technology to appear, briefly, was the thermal printer. This was before the days of the best-known thermal printer the fax machine. These early printers were less noisy than dot-matrix and they didn't have ribbons to wear out or dry up. Before faxes, thermal paper was prohibitively expensive and the technology languished. It is now resurfacing in the mobile market. The low power requirements make lightweight, battery-powered portable printers a reality.
One of these is the Pentax PocketJet yes, the same company as the cameras which weighs less than 500 grams, is only 30 mm x 55 mm x 255 mm, but will print at 300 x 300 dpi on A4 paper. It emulates the HP LaserJet II (PCL4), prints three pages per minute and will print upwards of 30 pages on a single Ni-Cd battery charge.
The biggest disadvantages of thermal paper are its propensity to fade in sunlight or when placed against certain plastics, its chalky feel and the difficulty of writing on it with ballpoint or pencil.
Laser printers are now well-known. It is the device that instigated the desktop publishing revolution and thus enabled the information explosion. These printers offer incredible flexibility in their ability to produce graphics, halftone images (photographs) and type in any size and orientation.
They are available in speeds per minute of a few pages to more than 100 pages. per minute.
Laser printer technology is now extending into color, with impressive results. The imaging technology grew out of the photocopying industry and suffers the same problems. The paper must withstand high temperatures as toner is fused to it, it must be light enough to heat properly in the fusion process and smooth enough for toner to adhere. There is a large range of specialty paper, both plain and preprinted, that satisfies these requirements.
The only other thing to be wary of is that some plastics have an affinity for toner and will remove it from laser-printed pages if they are left in contact for too long.
Inkjet printers are becoming very popular, due to a combination of quality output and low price. There is not much a laser can do that can't be done on an inkjet. The big difference is speed: inkjets are much slower. The paper requirements are different the inkjet is a cold process, but it uses liquid ink that must dry. It will also soak into paper, so paper quality and print quality go hand in hand.
The cost of ink cartridges can be a little higher than toner, but this is balanced by the lower capital cost. Because the images have been formed from a soluble ink they may run if they get damp.
© 1995 The Age