Buying a printer

The worldwide printer market is large - most computers have some sort of printer attached. Considering the substantial manufacturing and distribution economies of scale present in the industry there are a surprising number of printer manufacturers. In many industries there is one dominant force, half a dozen much smaller competitors and a scatter of specialists. The printer industry is dominated by Hewlett Packard with its Laserjet and Deskjet series but there are many others including:

Alps, Avery, Brother, Canon, Citizen, C.Itoh, Dataproducts, Digital, Dysan, Epson, Facit, Fargo, Fujitsu, Genicom, Hewlett Packard, Hitachi, IBM, ICL, Kodak-Diconix, Kyocera, Konica-Minolta, Lexmark, Lannier, Memorex-Telex, NCR, NEC, Newbury Data, Nokia, OCE, OKI, Olivetti, Olympus, Panasonic, Printronix, Polaroid, PPI, Qume, Ricoh, Samsung, Sato, Seiko Precision, Seikosha, Siemens, Sharp, Sony, Star, Spectra, Tally-Genicom, Targus, TDK, Tektronix (c), Texus Instruments, Toshiba, Xerox. Zebra.

3M, Imation,

Compatible Ribbons

Apple, Compaq,
 

Automation Facilities, Diablo, EPD, Encad, Exabyte, Exponent, Fellowes, FujiFilms, Fuji-Xerox, GCC TEchnologies, Infotec, Iomega, Kensington, Lexar Media, Logitech, Maxell, Microsoft, QMS (Konica-Minolta), Mita, Muratec, Newgen, Olympia, OnStream, Output Technology, Plasmon, Pitney Bowes, Pressit, Quantum, Triumph Adler, XES.

Calcomp Canon, Color Span, Mutoh, Océ,  Summa, Roland

Centronics
 
 
 

To give some guidance

Fujitsu,  Genicom and Printronix lead in high speed

Epson leads the pack in small dot matrix printers, although Brother, OKI, and Panasonic all have credible offerings.

Brother, Tally and Newbury have good, solid tested eliable designs for large dot matrix machines. Printronics and Tally take the lead in producing fast shuttle printers.

Hewlett Packard and Canon seem to lead in laser-printers. Kyocera’s designs using amorphous silicon may be attractive if price per page is a primary concern..

Hewlett Packard, Canon and Epson lead in production of inkjet machines, but nearly every other manufacturer offers some sort of inkjet model.

Tektronix are leaders in producing unusual "top end" machines for functions such as thermal process colour imaging. Their machines tend to be innovative but costly to buy. Spares are often nightmare prices.