PRINT QUALITY
Here’s the hierarchy of printer quality:
1. Draft quality. The letters are too dotty for anything but drafts and correspondence with enemies whose eyes you want to torture.
2. Correspondence quality. It’ll do for a letter to a forgiving friend or business associate.
3. Near-letter quality. You can get away with it for book manuscripts, especially if you already have a contract.
4. Letter quality. That’s typewriter quality.
A friend described my Microprism’s supposed “near-letter quality” as looking like “an upscale grocery store receipt.” It was a long way from a daisy wheel.
Still, Judith Axler Turner, a nationally syndicated computer columnist, says dot matrix might actually help her at times; she can print the letters larger than regular typewritten characters. Her manuscripts command more attention.
A Washington lawyer fared worse using a dot-matrix machine without near-letter quality. A judge threw out his brief.
We dot-matrix plebeians, before buying, should test the print quality on a number of people, especially colleagues or clients. Are they happy with the shapes, sizes, and quality of the characters? Do they feel that our dots blend smoothly into each other? Usually, the more pins a dot-matrix printer has, the better will be the printing. Many dot-matrix printers in late 1984 had a matrix of seven-by-nine wires. In 1984 Epson was selling the $1,500 LQ-1500 with twice that density and “letter-quality characters to rival fine office typewriters.” I looked one over. The typewriters were still winning.