Dot Matrix Printers - Market

Printers > Dot Matrix >

Navigation Icons Guide

	Printers Index
	Dot Matrix Printers Index (here)
	Dot Matrix Main Text

Dot Matrix Printer Market

Basic dot-matrix printers cost a bit more to buy than inkjet printers, but ink from a ribbon is a fraction of the cost of ink from an inkjet cartridge. Cheap dot-matrix printers can be used as personal printers for home use - and used to be ideal for students. The "home use" market has largely been taken away by inkjet printers which produce better looking pages with graphics and photographs. The ink cartridges used in inkjets also make them easier to operate - although they do cost much more to run.

One role for the low cost dot-matrix printer is as a robust printer on a factory floor. In a dusty environment a low cost inkjet wouldn't last a month without a fault but a dot matrix will plough on regardless. Actually there are two approaches:

Another role is in instrumentation - most notably in POS terminals. A big benefit of dot matrix in a cash register is that the impact printing works on multi-part paper so the top copy can be given to the customer and a lower copy is wound up on a tally-roll. In smaller shops the simplicity of a tally roll can be preferable to collecting data on a server.

One approach to buying is to buy a robust printer intended for the environment - it will be expensive but may see 5 -10 years of service. There are dot matrix printers out there more than 10 years old that have outlasted two or three replacements of the computers.

The other is to buy a low cost office / home printer. The printer might be written off after a year or two, but it will have printed more than 50,000 pages and paid for it's £150 - 250 cost. If it can be refurbished for £95 and do another 2 years so much the better. The only issue here can be that the printer will almost innevitably break down at the worst possible moment.

The balance of benefit is probably with the big printer:

Ribbons last longer. A big printer will come with a big, long life ribbon. It is true that those ribbons will cost a lot to buy but they will also do a great deal of printing.

Printheads last longer. The printhead in a big printer uses long-life print jewels and big coils rated for continual use.

The mechanisms in a low cost printer have a life limited by all sorts of seemingly minor cost cutting factors in the design. Users often forget that a printer is not rated for continuous use just for several hundred pages per day. Cooling, lubricant flow, ribbon and printhead life all depend on the printer "resting" between work cycles. If the printer is not allowed to rest then excessive wear will cause premature failure. These limited duty cycles are even more true for inkjets than dot matrix printers. Printer are mechanical and continually running mechanics that weren't designed for the job will destroy them.

High Speed Dot Matrix Printers

High speed dot matrix printers are suited for use in corporate payroll, invoicing, picking, labelling and delivery list printing - corporate transaction tasks.

The high-speed dot matrix competes for corporate transaction tasks with

Laser printers - 12 page per minute office workgroup machines at the low end, and 100 page per minute continuous feed automatic guillotine machines at the high end. Low cost laser printer's have the disadvantage that they will cost about 1- 2p per page to operate, and they generally need a easonably clean, warm, dry environment.
Line printers - capable of 1200 lines per minute, (which can be just 20 or as many as 200 pages per minute). The line-printers disadvantage is that it's purchase price is likely to exceed £10,000.
Thermal transfer and thermal direct label printers -capable of 600 lines per minute or more, but consumables are likely to cost about 1-2 p per label

High speed dot-matrix printers benefit from the low operating costs of large fabric ribbons, but are not as expenisve to buy as line printers and thermal transfer label printers - athough they can often do the same job. High speed dot matrix printers can:

put ink on paper at about 0.1p per page
handle multi-part paper so there is a legally indisputable transaction ecord.
cost less to buy than a line-printer or continuous stationery laser

Advantages of Dot Matrix

Ten years ago the automatic choice for a printer was dot-matrix, but this is no longer true - laser printers and inkjets are much more common choices. Laser printers generally produce better looking pages more quickly. Inkjet printers are cheap to buy and simple to operate.

Dot matrix printers have some advantages, they are:

Low price per printed page using fabric ribbons
Ability to handle multi-part (carbon copy) paper
Ability to handle tractor feed continuous forms
Work in poor environments - cold dusty warehouses

Dot matrix printers also have some problems:

Serial dot-matrix mechanisms are rather slow - low cost laser-printers and inkjets and even most thermal printers are faster than most dot-matrix printers
Ugly print - dot matrix ouput doesn't usually look as good as inkjet or laser printing.
They don't always handle cut-sheet A4 - a cut-sheet feeder can be fitted but it often costs extra and is comparatively troublesome
They are rather noisy. A dot matrix can often be heard even in a noisy factory.

Dot matrix printer designs are still being manufactured - many manufacturers have one or two in their product lists. For some jobs they are essential.

In a warehouse printing delivery notes the dot-matrix printer works very well. It's ability to print on multi-part stationery is invaluable because the carbon copy of the customers signature on the delivery note may be an essential part of the business process. There may well be another dot-matrix printer set up to produce picking-lists to make up customers orders. Laser, inkjet or thermal technology could be used for this - but the dot matrix is likely to be cheapest to run and least troublesome.

Financial transactions may also use dot-matrix printers with 2 or 3 part stationery to give a record. Payroll, Invoices, Cash receipting and suchlike tasks can commonly benefit from having a carbon-paper copy of the original. The computer system may be able to reproduce the original - but who is to prove that the data has not been ammended. Carbon paper has known forensic qualities, so if the paper is stored away it will make disputes easier to resolve.

The dot matrix mechanism can also handle stationery that some other print-technologies have difficulty with, labels being an example. Standard inket and laser printers can use special label stationery that has no gaps between labels, but they print a whole sheet at a time - even if just one label is wanted. Thermal printers can produce one label at a time on their special stationery - but direct thermal paper fades in sunlight so it may not be suitable where the labels have to last. Thermal transfer works better - but the ribbons are quite expensive. A dot matrix printer can produce one label at low cost on demand. For labelling and tear-off point of sale invoices the printer needs to be equipped with a push-tractor - which isn't always a standard fitting.

In the future this page should give some examples of dot matrix priners together with prices - I'm working on it.