In a dot-matrix printer like the 480, little pins hit the ribbon, making impressions on the paper. An “A” is one series of pins, a “B” another, and so on. The quality normally isn’t any match for the daisy wheel’s, even though the price may be much lower than a daisy going the same speed. “Prints like a daisy, costs like a matrix!” Integral Data Systems touted the Model 480. That was stretching matters.
The letters from my next printer, a Panasonic KX-P1092, could almost pass for a typewriter’s. It sold discounted at a local store for $489, just a few dollars more than Anderson Jacobson wanted for its one-year maintenance contract.
Here’s what else I could have chosen—rightly or not:
1. Another daisy wheel machine. The daisy wheel is plastic or metal and looks vaguely like some flowers, with many strokes radiating from the center. The spokes contain letters and numbers, and your computer tells what spoke the printer should strike—which it does with a little hammer. Run a noisy daisy wheel at one in the morning in a thin-walled apartment with an early-rising neighbor on the other side and you may get a not-so-friendly visit from the police or zoning department.
2. A laser printer. Typically, it works a bit like some copying machines, with your computer controlling the printed image rather than a document you put in front of a mirror. This wasn’t the choice for me; laser printers at the time went for several thousand dollars up. By now, however, the price may be much lower. Political fund-raisers love the nice quality that lasers can add to slick letters saying how badly they need your money.
3. A thermal-transfer printer. This uses patterns of heat to arrange the images on special paper; it’s quiet. Normally, the paper can be expensive, and the printing quality is poor; so thermal printers were also out of the running[running] for me. Later, however, IBM introduced its Quietwriter printer, which prints beautifully on ordinary paper.
4. An ink-jet printer. This kind literally squirts ink against the paper in patterns forming letters and numbers; and the noise level is low, maybe 50 decibels, compared to 65 or more that a daisy wheel might inflict. What a boon to apartment dwellers and people in already-noisy offices.
While I was shopping for the Anderson Jacobson’s replacement, I didn’t take ink jets very seriously because of the broken-up letters that came from them. A year later, however, I talked to Richard Sugden, a Wyoming M.D., the owner of a PT-88 ink-jet from Siemens, selling in the $900 range, who may have had a limited solution.
He used the 88 with a special printing program called Fancy Font and high-quality paper that soaked up the ink neatly.
The program slowed his printer down to a fraction of the usual 160 characters per second but greatly improved his print even if it still couldn’t pass for a daisy wheel’s. You can also team up Fancy Font with some dot-matrix machines, especially those from Epson. Then you can print in a number of sizes and styles, including “olde English.” Don’t overdo. “Fancy,” as its makers joke in a printing sample, “may either kill or cure.”