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The Printer Dilemma

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PCQ Bureau
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A few weeks ago, I got a call from a friend who was buying a PC and needed some help with finalizing the purchase. My friend runs a successful medium-sized business, and wanted to buy a machine that could be used for running accounting software, office applications, and browsing the Internet. This was to be his first machine. He had offers from several vendors and wanted some advice on which one to select. 

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This turned out to be anything but simple. The problem lay not in deciding on the PC but in zeroing in on a printer. The key issue was dot matrix versus inkjet. Dot matrix seemed to be the obvious choice from the accounting software angle. Inkjet seemed the right choice from the word processing and browsing side. My friend wanted to use the machine for both types of applications. What really irritated him was the fact that he would perforce have to settle for sub-optimal printing for at least half of his applications. Sadly enough he was right. 

There is a great deal of confusion in the marketplace today because of the fact that printing technology has evolved on two very different paths. On one side you have the impact printers, which are direct descendants of the line printers. On the other side are the non-impact printers that have grown out of the corporate culture of presentations and reports. 

Impact printers, such as dot matrix printers, excel in high speed printing of pure ASCII data. They are ideal for accounting based applications where lengthy reports are the norm. They also offer, great reliability and a very low printing cost per page. Their output is easy to manage and can be filed away in data binders. They are the only choice for the financial accounting application that generates thirty pages per week as the weekly cashbook, and fifty to hundred pages as the monthly ledger. 

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The only problem with dot matrix printers is that they are terrible at printing formatted documents. They provide primitive support for fonts and graphics and are terrible for anything that has to be routed through a Windows printer driver. Windows printing speed is slow, and terrible on the ribbon and head. 

Non-impact printers such as inkjets, deskjets and lasers, excel at handling richly formatted text. They are the only choice for presentation intensive environments. Unfortunately, they are slow at printing pure ASCII data and their reliability is increasingly suspect, especially at the entry level. Their cost per page is much higher than that of the dot matrix printer. Repairs are prohibitively expensive. Voluminous deskjet output is tough to handle and can only be filed in conventional file folders.

Large organizations can afford to have both types of printers in abundance, and use the one best suited to the application at hand. Small organizations with limited resources have a tougher call to make. I suspect that most such offices end up buying both types of printers.

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Let me end with a somewhat biased observation. According to me, the best printers ever made were the Epson FX series of dot matrix printers. I bought a FX-105 in 1986, used it for 12 years, (with the head being changed twice) and managed to sell it for a reasonable amount. No other hardware that I have owned has ever given such service. Today dot matrix printers are good for about five to six years, after which their usability shows a sharp decline and deskjets rarely last for more than two to three years.

The bottom line. Impact and non-impact printers are increasingly becoming mutually exclusive. You might end up buying both.

Gautama Ahuja runs a turnkey software development company, AHC Infotek

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