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A dot matrix printer or impact matrix printer is a type of computer printer with a print head that runs back and forth, or in an up and down motion, on the page and prints by impact, striking an ink-soaked cloth ribbon against the paper, much like the print mechanism on a typewriter. However, unlike a typewriter or daisy wheel printer, letters are drawn out of a dot matrix, and thus, varied fonts and arbitrary graphics can be produced. Because the printing involves mechanical pressure, these printers can create carbon copies and carbonless copies. Its speed of printing varies from 50 to 500 cps. Each dot is produced by a tiny metal rod, also called a "wire" or "pin", which is driven forward by the power of a tiny electromagnet or solenoid, either directly or through small levers (pawls). Facing the ribbon and the paper is a small guide plate (often made of an artificial jewel such as sapphire or ruby[1]) pierced with holes to serve as guides for the pins. The moving portion of the printer is called the print head, and when running the printer generally prints one line of text at a time. Most dot matrix printers have a single vertical line of dotmaking equipment on their print heads; others have a few interleaved rows in order to improve dot density.
Typical output from a dot matrix printer operating in draft mode. This entire image represents an area of printer output approximately 4.5 cm 1.5cm (1.75 0.6 inches) in size.
These machines can be highly durable. When they do wear out, it is generally due to ink invading the guide plate of the print head, causing grit to adhere to it; this grit slowly causes the channels in the guide plate to wear from circles into ovals or slots, providing less and less accurate guidance to the printing wires. Eventually, even with tungsten blocks and titanium pawls, the printing becomes too unclear to read. Although nearly all inkjet, thermal, and laser printers also print closely spaced dots rather than continuous lines or characters, it is not customary to call them dot matrix printers.
Contents
1 Early dot matrix printers 2 Dot matrix usage 2.1 Personal computers 2.2 Pseudo-color 2.3 Near Letter Quality (NLQ) 2.4 24-pin printers 2.5 Use of dot matrix printers today 3 Advantages and disadvantages 3.1 Advantages
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot_matrix_printer
This is an example of a widecarriage printer, designed for paper 14 inches wide, shown with legal paper loaded (8.5" x 14"). Wide carriage printers were often used by businesses, to print accounting records on 11" x 14" tractor-feed paper. They were also called 132column printers, though this description was only true for a specific font size and type that was built into the printer's electronics.
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printer's memory, replacing the built-in typeface with the user's selection. Any subsequent text printout would use the downloaded font, until the printer was powered off or soft-reset. Several third-party programs were developed to allow easier management of this capability. With a supported word-processor program (such as WordPerfect 5.1), the user could embed up to 2 NLQ custom typefaces in addition to the printer's built-in (ROM) typefaces. (The later rise of WYSIWYG software philosophy rendered downloaded fonts obsolete.) Single-strike and Multi-strike ribbons were an attempt to address issues in the ribbon's ink quality. Standard printer ribbons used the same principles as typewriter ribbons. The printer would be at its darkest with a newly installed ribbon cartridge, but would gradually grow fainter with each successive printout. The variation in darkness over the ribbon cartridge's lifetime prompted the introduction of alternative ribbon formulations. Single-strike ribbons used a carbon-like substance in typewriter ribbons transfer. As the ribbon was only usable for a single loop (rated in terms of 'character count'), the blackness was of consistent, outstanding darkness. Multi-strike ribbons gave an increase in ribbon life, at the expense of quality. The high quality of single-strike ribbons had two side effects: At least 50% and up to 99.9% of the given ribbon surface would be wasted per character, since an entire fresh new region of ribbon was needed to print even the smallest font shapes. Ribbon advance was fixed to always span the largest character shape, so a row of periods would consume as much fresh ribbon as a row of W's, with a large span of unused carbon between each dot. Single-strike ribbons created a risk of espionage and loss of privacy, because the used ribbon reel could be unwound to reveal everything that had been printed. Secure disposal was required by shredding, melting, or burning of used ribbon cartridges to prevent recovery of information from garbage bins.
Pseudo-color
Several manufacturers implemented color dot-matrix impact printing through a multi-color ribbon. Color was achieved through a multi-pass composite printing process. During each pass, the print head struck a different section of the ribbon (one primary color.) For a 4-color ribbon, each printed line of output required a total of 4 passes. In some color printers, such as the Apple ImageWriter II, the printer moved the ribbon relative to the fixed print head assembly. In other models, the print head was tilted against a stationary ribbon. Due to their poor color quality and increased operating expense, color impact models never replaced their monochrome counterparts.[citation needed] As the color ribbon was used in the printer, the black ink section would gradually contaminate the other 3 colors, changing the consistency of printouts over the life of the ribbon. Hence, the color dot-matrix was suitable for abstract illustrations and piecharts, but not for photo-realistic reproduction. Dot-matrix thermal-transfer printers offered more consistent color quality, but consumed printer film, still more expensive. Color printing in the home would only become ubiquitous much later, with the ink-jet printer.The speed is usually 30-550 cps
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smaller paper movement (1/3 vertical dot pitch, or 1/216 inch) between the passes. To cut hardware costs, some manufacturers merely used a double strike (doubly printing each line) to increase the printed text's boldness, resulting in bolder but still jagged text. In all cases, NLQ mode incurred a severe speed penalty. Not surprisingly, all printers retained one or more 'draft' modes for high-speed printing. NLQ became a standard feature on all dot-matrix printers. While NLQ was well received in the IBM PC market, the Apple Macintosh market did not use NLQ mode at all, as it did not rely on the printer's own fonts. Mac word-processing applications used fonts stored in the computer. For non-PostScript (raster) printers, the final raster image was produced by the computer and sent to the printer, which meant dot-matrix printers on the Mac platform exclusively used raster ("graphics") printing mode. For near-letter-quality output, the Mac would simply double the resolution used by the printer, to 144 dpi, and use a screen font twice the point size desired. Since the Mac's screen resolution (72 dpi) was exactly half of the ImageWriter's maximum, this worked perfectly, creating text at exactly the desired size. Due to the extremely precise alignment required for dot alignment between NLQ passes, typically the paper needed to be held somewhat taut in the tractor feed sprockets, and the continuous paper stack must perfectly aligned behind or below the printer. Loosely held paper or skewed supply paper could cause misalignments between passes, rendering the NLQ text illegible.
24-pin printers
By the mid 1980s, manufacturers had increased the pincount of the impact printhead from 9 pins to 18, or 24. (At 27 pins, the Apple ImageWriter LQ held the record for consumer market). The increased pin-count permitted superior print-quality which was necessary for success in Asian markets to print legible CJK characters.[4] In the PC market, nearly all 9-pin printers printed at a defacto-standard vertical pitch of 9/72 inch (per printhead pass, i.e. 8 lpi). Epson's 24-pin LQ-series rose to become the new de-facto standard, at 24/180 inch (per pass - 7.5 lpi). Not only could a 24-pin printer lay down a denser dot-pattern in a single-pass, it could simultaneously cover a larger area. Compared to the older 9-pin models, a new 24-pin impact printer not only produced better-looking NLQ text, it printed the page more quickly (largely due to the 24-pin's ability to print NLQ with a single pass). 24-pin printers repeated this feat in bitmap graphics mode, producing higher-quality graphics in reduced time. While the text-quality of a 24-pin was still visibly inferior to a true letter-quality printerthe daisy wheel or laser-printer, the typical 24-pin impact printer outpaced most daisy-wheel models. As manufacturing costs declined, 24-pin printers gradually replaced 9-pin printers. 24-pin printers reached a dot-density of 360x360 dpi, a marketing figure aimed at potential buyers of competing ink-jet and laser-printers. 24-pin NLQ fonts generally used a dot-density of 360x180, the highest allowable with single-pass printing. Multipass NLQ was abandoned, as most manufacturers felt the marginal quality improvement did not justify the tradeoff in speed. Most 24-pin printers offered 2 or more NLQ typefaces, but the rise of WYSIWYG software and GUI environments such as Microsoft Windows ended the usefulness of NLQ.
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As of 2005, dot matrix impact technology remains in use in devices such as cash registers, ATM, Fire alarm systems, and many other point-of-sales terminals. Thermal printing is gradually supplanting them in these applications. Full-size dot-matrix impact printers are still used to print multi-part stationery, for example at bank tellers and auto repair shops, and other applications where use of tractor feed paper is desirable such as data logging and aviation. Some are even fitted with USB interfaces as standard to aid connection to modern legacyfree computers. Dot matrix printers are also more tolerant of the hot and dirty operating conditions found in many industrial settings. The simplicity and durability of the design allows users who are not "computer literate" to easily perform routine tasks such as changing ribbons and correcting paper jams. Some companies, such as Printek, DASCOM, WeP Peripherals, Epson, Okidata, Olivetti, Lexmark, and TallyGenicom still produce serial and line printers. Today, a new dot matrix printer actually costs more than most inkjet printers and some entry level laser printers. However, not much should be read into this price difference as the printing costs for inkjet and laser printers are a great deal higher than for dot matrix printers, and the inkjet/laser printer manufacturers effectively use their monopoly over arbitrarily priced printer cartridges to subsidise the initial cost of the printer itself. Dot matrix ribbons are a commodity and are not monopolised by the printer manufacturers themselves.
Disadvantages
Impact printers create noise when the pins or typeface strike the ribbon to the paper.[5] Sound dampening enclosures may have to be used in quiet environments. They can only print lower-resolution graphics, with limited color performance, limited quality, and lower speeds compared to non-impact printers. While they support fanfold paper with tractor holes well, single-sheet paper may have to be wound in and aligned by hand, which is relatively time-consuming, or a sheet feeder may be utilized which can have a lower paper feed reliability. When printing labels on release paper, they are prone to paper jams when a print wire snags the leading edge of the label while printing at its very edge. For text-only labels (e.g., mailing labels), a daisy wheel printer or band printer may offer better print quality and a lesser chance of damaging the paper.
See also
Media related to Dot matrix printers at Wikimedia Commons Character matrix printer Daisy wheel printer Dye-sublimation printer Golf ball printer Inkjet printer
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References
1. ^ "United States Patent 4194846" (http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4194846.html) . 1980-03-25. http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4194846.html. Retrieved 2009-07-16. 2. ^ "MX-80 SOUND" (http://www.trouserpress.com/entry.php?a=mx-80_sound) . http://www.trouserpress.com/entry.php?a=mx-80_sound. 3. ^ Dot Matrix, InfoWorld Jul 28, 1986 (http://books.google.com/books? id=Vy8EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA30&dq=dot%20matrix%20letter%20quality&pg=PA40#v=onepage&q&f=false) . http://books.google.com/books? id=Vy8EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA30&dq=dot%20matrix%20letter%20quality&pg=PA40#v=onepage&q&f=false. 4. ^ High speed, near letter quality dot matrix printers Popular Science Dec 1983 (http://books.google.com/books?id=kawCnk4051wC&lpg=PA139&pg=PA139#v=onepage&f=false) . http://books.google.com/books?id=kawCnk4051wC&lpg=PA139&pg=PA139#v=onepage&f=false. 5. ^ "Panasonic KX-P2123. (dot-matrix printer) (Hardware Review) (Evaluation)" (http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue144/G10_Panasonic_KXP2123.php) . http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue144/G10_Panasonic_KXP2123.php.
External links
History of DEC (http://www.decitaly.org/museo/docs/dechistory.htm) Flatbed Dot Matrix Printers (http://www.oki.co.uk/fcgi-bin/public.fcgi? pid=37&cid=125&pncid=5&nid=236) Printek (http://www.printek.com/) Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dot_matrix_printer&oldid=507676192" Categories: Computer printers Impact printers DEC hardware This page was last modified on 16 August 2012 at 12:15. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. See Terms of use for details. Wikipedia is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot_matrix_printer
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