Lasers lead way from dotty printers

Press, 8 July 1986, Page 33

Lasers lead way from dotty printers

Printers have long occupied one of the backwaters of the computer industry. GARETH POWELL reports on how manufacturers are bringing them into line with developing screen technology.

As one area of computers advances, another is left lagging slightly behind.

At the moment, you can buy a very high quality graphics screen for a personal computer. With the right supporting hardware and software, it will give you high-fidelity colour of more than a million pixels on the screen.

You can sit and admire that picture all day, or call your friends round for them to be impressed, but you cannot print it out, not to anything like the same standard, not with anything like the same quality of colour. Printer technology has, sadly, lagged . behind screen technology. But, 10, look yonder where the land is bright and printers gallop like mad things in order to catch up. If you were involved with computers back in the steam age, you will well remember with some bitterness that, from the beginning, printers had a stranglehold on computer tech nology.

The computer could speed along as fast as it liked, but the operational speed was controlled by how long it took you to enter the raw data and how long it took you to print out the computed result

In most cases, that was forever, because we were using converted telex machines both for input and output These castiron clunkers were so slow they left two generations of computer programmers with a bitter and enduring hatred of the telex.

When the first Altairs and Apples came on to the market in the middle of the seventies, they typically printed out 40-

column text — and that only in capital letters. The printers needed to cope with this output were not electronically sophisticated. They were mainly, yet again, the dreaded converted telex machine of dreaded memory, or converted electric typewriters, with a sad tendency to fall gracelessly apart at an early and inconvenient date, and thermal dot matrix printers. These thermal printers — still in use in their original format — produced greyish type on fairly expensive paper, which had a tendency to fade quickly. But the printers were totally silent, and the copy

was quite readable. As well, these machines had a limited graphics capability. If you wanted any sort of permanence for your copy you printed out on thermal paper and then photocopied the result

Not the easiest way of working. As computers quickly changed to 80-column format and upper and lower case characters — at first through an expensive and complicated retrofitted kit and later as standard — so printers changed to cope, and the Impact dot matrix started to carve Itself a major part of the market

From the beginning, the. market in dot matrix printers was totally dominated by two Japanese companies — Epson and C. Itoh. It mattered not that the front your computer said Apple Writer or Panasonic. Underneath, it was a machine from one of these two companies of the Rising Sun. These early machines were miracles, but they were noisy and the resulting printout, though perfectly legible and to some eyes elegant to behold, looked like dot matrix.

And so the market split into two. Those who accepted dot matrix because it was cheap or because they liked the high-tech image it gave. And those who wanted their correspondence to look as if it had been typed by a secretary and so demanded a printer which was, in effect and in fact, a converted electronic .typewriter. In the last two years, dot matrix impact printers have been getting better and better and they produce what all sales

executives lovingly describe as near letter quality print In truth, some of them are so good you cannot tell the difference between their output andcopy produced on an electric typewriter. Printers were starting to catch up with screen images — but not quite. And before they could make the final burst screen images leaped forward again. Now computers are getting even more sohlsticated in their screen images and in their ability to produce graphics, and printers are once again struggling to catch up.

What follows is the current state of play.

There are four basic types of printers and these are again broken down into sub-groups. The biggest single group is the dot matrix printer. This in turn breaks down into three sub groups — impact, thermal (ribbon) and thermal (paper). Next comes the inkjet printer which, in a sense, is a type of dot matrix machine.

The next group is the daisy wheel, which is a direct lineal descendant of the office typewriter, although it has been gussied up with many different electronic features. Then there are the laser printers which are the technology of the future.

One of the current in phrases in printers is “NLQ,” or near letter quality. It is what every manufacturer claims for its dot matrix printers — and with some truth.

At the top of the line it is almost Impossible to tell the difference between typing from an ordinary electric typewriter. It is possible, but not easy. And in many cases you will need a magnifjring glass.

When dot matrix machines were launched, they had relatively few pins to strike the ribbon and leave the mark on the paper. In fact, I still have a venerable Seiko which has only one striking pin and used to hurl itself around at a great rate to produce singularly illformed letters on nonstandard paper. Now the number of pins has increased and you

'Will normally see a dot matrix printer being described as having a 9 x 9 matrix.

This does not mean nine rows of nine striking pins. It will normally only have one row of nine pins which will be struck one after the other coming down in descending rows. To make the printer produce near letter quality printing, the head traverses the same line twice, effectly changing a 9 x 9 matrix into an 18 x 18 matrix at which point you get something approaching perfection.

The current scene is that the daisy wheel printer (which, no matter what it is called, is still effectively a modified electronic typewriter) is under siege. It is being pushed from two directions. From underneath by dot matrix printers which are getting better and better with each passing day. These printers may not produce such perfect copy — although they are, in many cases, as close as spit — and they can be a tad noisier, but they are much quicker and they rarely break down.

There is a splendid phrase in computers called "MTBF,” which stands for mean time between failures.

The higher this figure, the more sure you are that computer mechanics will not be called to interrupt the even tenor of your days. Where pure electronics are involved the problems will normally arise only during the early hours of usage. If it does not go wrong, then it will probably last as long as Oliver Wendell Holmes’s one-horse shay. Where the problems normally arise is when electronics and mechanical parts are forced into a marriage— a marriage that following modem trends is rarely happy and event free.

The daisy wheel printer has far more of these electro-mechanical parts than a dot matrix, and its mean time between failures is, as a consequence, much shorter.

In my time, I have had several of these machines. I have been bamboozled and bewildered by an assortment of mechanical ailments caused by the failure of delicate parts which needed to work to

very fine tolerances. Because of this reliability problem and because of a critical speed problem, daisy wheel printers are being replaced by dot matrix printers as and when these dot matrix printers move into the near letter quality mode, which they are doing in a major way. Every day, in every way, they are getting better and better.

One of the reasons why dot matrix printers are reaching such high levels of clarity and definition is that they are made by the Japanese. When they were originally designed, they had to deal with the Japanese ideogram forms of writing — kategana, hiragana and kanji.

These forms are much more intricate and much more involved, than normal English characters. Consequently, a very high standard of resolution is required from these printers if they are to be acceptable on the Japanese market

And that benefit carries over to the rest of the world. Attacking the daisy wheel from above is the laser printer.

The most popular version was released by Canon in 1983 — Xerox had one some years before — and is the driving engine for every laser printer on the market with, again, the single exception of Xerox. According to a government report, this engine is sold to the printer manufacturers for a price around the $l3OO mark. My own understanding is that the figure is nearer $5OO and dropping. The report goes on to say that with an increase in volume the engine will probably be eventually sold to printer manufacturers for much less than $l3O.

in fact, it suggests that $25 is attainable, which strains one’s credulity. The net result of this is we will undoubtedly see a laser printer on the New Zealand market within the next two years at a price of less than $l3OO. And on that day the daisy wheel will finally die. The laser printer is faster, quieter and produces a far more elegant output than a daisy wheel. Its end product is not near letter quality, it is near print quality, which is much better.

As well, it can easily handle a wide range of graphics which makes reports and letters far easier to read, and gives sales presentations far more impact We do not yet have the colour laser available, but there is no doubt it will come, perhaps within the next two years. My guess is it will, in the long run, drive every other kind of printer out of the market The problem for the daisy wheel is it is at the apogee of its development. There is no way in .which this relatively elderly technology can be dramatically Improved. Therefore It will die. The only argument is when that death will occur.