Posts Tagged ‘printers’
In my last post I blithely wrote about printing out your story. And that simply indicates that there are two or three ways of dealing with your story.
You can:
- Read it on the screen
- Print it out on paper
- Read it on a special electronic reader
Reading on the computer screen can be tiring and of course you are then tied to a screen even if your computer is portable. Electronic readers are still very much at the initial stages of development – one the latest being the Amazon Kindle.
So for the moment, the traditional option is to print your text though this will cost you in terms of money, paper and printing resources and time.
One problem is, which type of printer? Now you’ve probably got a printer so you’ll use it anyway. However, if you haven’t got a printer or you’d like to think a bit more about it there are a few options.
Here’s a few thoughts on typical printing technologies available given in the order of their development so to speak.
Dot Matrix Printers
You’re likely to see these around in shops and business rather than offices and there’s a good reason for this:
They’re the only type that can produce a copy at the same time as printing the orginal so are useful for billing and so on.
They work much like an old fashioned typewriter in that they have a head with metal pins that move across the page and physically strike a ribbon.
Now this may sound pretty old fashioned but they’re still in widespread use so you can get ribbon supplies and the fanfold paper – paper folded up in a concertina fashion – that they typically use. You’ll have more luck in an office supplies shop than a computer store.
Are they any good?
- Well they’re quite good at printing text and they’re pretty cheap to run. Not much good for graphics or colour.
- The cheapest dot matrix printers have 9 pins and more sophisticated models have 24 which makes for good printed output with a fresh ribbon.
- You can set them up and leave them to print. The main problem is that they are noisy and of course not much good for printing anything but text.
Next in line are:
Ink jet printers
These are very popular these days and it’s easy to see why. Inkjet printers are usually pretty cheap to buy and can produce a very high quality output. they’re specially good at printing colour and good quality colour photographs.
However, from the point of view of printing out large amounts of text they do have certain disadvantages.
- If they’re not used frequently you can find that the print heads dry up and you have a lot of trouble unclogging them and getting them to work again.
- Another problem is that if you print a lot of text with an inkjet printer replacing the cartridges can be very expensive and quite soon the cost of printing is quite soon more than the cost of the printer.
There’s been quite a lot of discussion about this and even the European Commission has got involved.
You can try using cartridges from independent manufactures, recycled cartridges and even try refilling the cartridges yourself but these techniques all have their downside. The printer manufacturers don’t like this.
A third kind of printer is the
Laser Printer
Laser printers are traditionally quite expensive to buy but they tend to be cheaper to run. Some of them are mono only printers, that is they will print only in black and white.
Some will print colour which is suitable for coloured documents but tends not to be photo quality.
Laser printers also have certain disadvantages.
- They make a certain amount of noise – though no more than the inkjet printers.
- There are some concerns about health and safety because they use similar technology to photocopiers and use some rather unpleasant chemicals to produce their results.
However, from the point of printing out text, they will print out the best quality at the lowest cost if you choose carefully and check the cost of printing – some printers are cheaper to buy but more expensive to run than others.
Also check how easy it is to replace the toners and drums when you need to.
So, purely from the point of view of printing out texts I’d probably think first of dot matrix printers and laser printers and look on ink jets only for occasional use.
I think if you have a choice, it’s worth looking at the technologies available.
A word of warning – technology is always changing. I’m only talking about printing standard text not graphics, photos, or PDF documents.
And
Please understand that I’m only giving my opinion and that you are entirely responsible for your choice and use of printers.
Next time I think we’ll have a look at free books prepared in PDF – or Portable Document Format. This is an open standard independent format created by Adobe Systems in 1993
