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51-416: The ImageWriter is a product line of dot matrix printers formerly manufactured by Apple Computer, Inc. , and designed then to be compatible with their entire line of computers. There were three different models introduced over time, which were popular among Apple II and Mac owners. The first ImageWriter is a serial -based dot matrix printer introduced by Apple Computer in late 1983. The printer

102-620: A serial interface (LA30-S); however, the serial LA30 required the use of fill characters during the carriage-return. In 1972, a receive-only variation named LA30A became available. The LA30 was followed in 1974 by the LA36, which achieved far greater commercial success, becoming for a time the standard dot matrix computer terminal. The LA36 used the same print head as the LA30 but could print on forms of any width up to 132 columns of mixed-case output on standard green bar fanfold paper . The carriage

153-447: A stepper motor , rotary encoder attached to one wheel, or a transparent plastic band with markings that is read by an optical sensor on the printer head (common on inkjets ). Because the printing involves mechanical pressure, dot matrix printers can create carbon copies and carbonless copies . Although nearly all inkjet , thermal , and laser printers also print closely spaced dots rather than continuous lines or characters, it

204-577: A 9-pin C. Itoh mechanism. However, the ImageWriter II was significantly faster in draft mode, where it could print 250 characters per second. Color images and text could be produced by using a color ribbon, and eight colors were supported by the original version of QuickDraw on the Mac despite running on a monochrome platform. On the Apple II , complex full-color graphics could be printed. Used with

255-450: A box of six. Dot matrix printer The perceived quality of dot matrix printers depends on the vertical and horizontal resolution and the ability of the printer to overlap adjacent dots. 9-pin and 24-pin are common; this specifies the number of pins in a specific vertically aligned space. With 24-pin printers, the horizontal movement can slightly overlap dots, producing visually superior output ( near letter-quality or NLQ), usually at

306-565: A conventional printer was replaced by a spinning, fluted cylinder. The print head was a simple hammer, with a vertical projecting edge, operated by an electromagnet. Where the vertical edge of the hammer intersected the horizontal flute of the cylinder, compressing the paper and ribbon between them, a single dot was marked on the paper. Characters were built up of multiple dots. Unlike the LA30 's 80-column, uppercase-only 5 x 7 dot matrix, DEC's product line grew. New models included: The DECwriter LA30

357-426: A horizontally moving print head. The print head can be thought of featuring a single vertical column of seven or more pins approximately the height of a character box. In reality, the pins are arranged in up to four vertically or/and horizontally slightly displaced columns in order to increase the dot density and print speed through interleaving without causing the pins to jam. Thereby, up to 48 pins can be used to form

408-458: A plug-in network card, buffer memory card, and motorized sheet feeder. It also supported color printing with an appropriate ribbon. The codename for the ImageWriter II was "Express" Compute! reported in 1989 that many believed that the ImageWriter II was inferior to its predecessor. The magazine stated that the first ImageWriter was sturdier, handled paper better, and had better print in most cases. The ImageWriter II, like its predecessor, used

459-457: A resolution of 144 DPI and a speed of about 120 CPS (characters per second). In text mode, the printer was logic-seeking, meaning it would print with the head moving in both directions while it would print only in one direction for graphics and Near Letter Quality. The ImageWriter was also supported by the original Macintosh computer, the Macintosh 128K . Apple wanted a graphical printer for

510-461: A simulated typewriter-like quality. By using multiple passes of the carriage, and higher dot density, the printer could increase the effective resolution. In 1985, The New York Times described the use of " near letter-quality, or NLQ" as "just a neat little bit of hype" but acknowledged that they "really show their stuff in the area of fonts, print enhancements and graphics." NLQ printers could generally be set to print in "draft mode", in which case

561-427: A single pass of the print head per line would be used. This produced lower quality print at much higher output speed. In 1985, PC Magazine wrote "for the average personal computer user dot matrix remains the most workable choice". At the time, IBM sold Epson 's MX-80 as their IBM 5152. Another technology, inkjet printing , which uses the razor and blades business model (give away the razor handle, make money on

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612-587: A standard feature to facilitate connections to modern computers without legacy ports. International Design Excellence Awards The International Design Excellence Awards ( IDEA ) is an award program previously co-sponsored by BusinessWeek magazine, and in 2010 Fast Company magazine and the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA). According to the IDSA, IDEA "is dedicated to fostering business and public understanding of

663-469: A time. The printer head is attached to a metal bar that ensures correct alignment, but horizontal positioning is controlled by a band that attaches to sprockets on two wheels at each side which is then driven with an electric motor. This band may be made of stainless steel, phosphor bronze or beryllium copper alloys, nylon or various synthetic materials with a twisted nylon core to prevent stretching. Actual position can be found out either by dead count using

714-465: A true letter-quality printer such as a daisy wheel or laser printer, print quality was greatly superior to a 9-pin printer. As manufacturing costs declined, 24-pin printers gradually replaced 9-pin printers. By the dawn of the 1990s, inkjet printers became more common as PC printers. Dot matrix printing uses a print head that moves back-and-forth, or in an up-and-down motion, on the page and prints by impact, striking an ink-soaked cloth ribbon against

765-403: Is a 27-pin dot matrix printer introduced in 1987 by Apple Computer, Inc. The print quality was comparable to competing 24-pin dot-matrix printers, and offered graphics at 320 × 216 DPI . Guaranteed compatibility with both Apple II and Mac computers made it popular in schools. The LQ had more options than any of the other Apple dot-matrix printers, including: Color ribbons were $ 149 for

816-557: Is fanfolded and perforated so that pages can be easily torn from each other. In 1925, Rudolf Hell invented the Hellschreiber , an early facsimile -like dot matrix –based teletypewriter device, patented in 1929. Between 1952 and 1954 Fritz Karl Preikschat filed five patent applications for his teletype writer 7 stylus 35 dot matrix aka PKT printer, a dot matrix teletypewriter built between 1954 and 1956 in Germany. Like

867-408: Is gradually supplanting them in some of these applications, but full-size dot-matrix impact printers are still used to print multi-part stationery . For example, dot matrix impact printers are still used at bank tellers and auto repair shops, and other applications where use of tractor feed paper is desirable such as data logging and aviation . Most of these printers now come with USB interfaces as

918-553: Is not customary to call them dot matrix printers. Dot matrix printers have one of the lowest printing costs per page. They are able to use fanfold continuous paper with tractor holes. Dot matrix printers create noise when the pins or typeface strike the ribbon to the paper, and sound-damping enclosures may have to be used in quiet environments. They can only print lower-resolution graphics, with limited color performance, limited quality, and lower speeds compared to non-impact printers. The common serial dot matrix printers use

969-527: The I.D. Design Review and Silver International Design Excellence Awards , making it the first desktop printer to receive such approbation. The printer had an expansion socket under the front cover which could accommodate either Apple's AppleTalk network card or 32K memory buffer card, but not both at the same time. Sequential Systems produced a 2-in-1 solution card that combined both features into one card, as well as larger memory buffer cards up to 1 MB. With an optional AppleTalk networking card installed, it

1020-512: The LA30 , as did Centronics (then of Hudson , New Hampshire ): the Centronics 101. The search for a reliable printer mechanism led it to develop a relationship with Brother Industries, Ltd of Japan , and the sale of Centronics-badged Brother printer mechanisms equipped with a Centronics print head and Centronics electronics. Unlike Digital, Centronics concentrated on the low-end line printer marketplace with their distinctive units. In

1071-752: The dye-sublimation printer entered the market. In 1968, the Japanese manufacturer OKI introduced its first serial impact dot matrix printer (SIDM), the OKI Wiredot. The printer supported a character generator for 128 characters with a print matrix of 7 × 5. It was aimed at governmental, financial, scientific and educational markets. For this achievement, OKI received an award from the Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ) in 2013. In 1970 Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) introduced an impact dot matrix printer ,

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1122-491: The 1980s. As carriage speed increased and dot density increased (from 60 dpi up to 240 dpi), with some adding color printing, additional typefaces allowed the user to vary the text appearance of printouts. Proportional-spaced fonts allowed the printer to imitate the non-uniform character widths of a typesetter, and also darker printouts. 'User-downloadable fonts' gave until the printer was powered off or soft-reset. The user could embed up to two NLQ custom typefaces in addition to

1173-507: The MX) were notoriously loud during operation, a result of the hammer-like mechanism in the print head. The MX-80 even inspired the name of a noise rock band . The MX-80's low dot density (60 dpi horizontal, 72 dpi vertical) produced printouts of a distinctive "computerized" quality. When compared to the crisp typewriter quality of a daisy-wheel printer, the dot-matrix printer's legibility appeared especially bad. In office applications, output quality

1224-559: The Mac, and had introduced the ImageWriter primarily to support the new machine. This permitted it to produce WYSIWYG output from the screen of the computer, which was an important aspect for promoting the concept of the GUI and, later, desktop publishing. The ImageWriter could be supported by Microsoft Windows -based PC's by using the included C. Itoh 8510 compatible driver. The ImageWriter

1275-653: The ThunderScan, an optical scanner that was installed in place of the ImageWriter ribbon cartridge. With support for the Apple II and the Mac, the ThunderScan provided low cost grayscale scanning with moderate resolution and speed. The ImageWriter II is a serial based dot matrix printer that was manufactured by Apple Computer , which supported its entire computer product line when it was released in September 1985. It had several optional add-ons available, including:

1326-512: The US in 1957 he sold the rights to utilize the applications in any country (except the USA) to TuN. The prototype was also shown to General Mills in 1957. An improved transistorized design became the basis for a portable dot matrix facsimile machine, which was prototyped and evaluated for military use by Boeing around 1966–1967. IBM marketed its first dot matrix printer in 1957, the same year that

1377-466: The appropriate software, the ImageWriter II could produce color images with potentially hundreds of simulated colors through dithering . The ImageWriter II has three ASCII text-quality modes: In addition to having the same ASCII and European-language characters found in the original ImageWriter, the ImageWriter II added 32 MouseText characters. The ImageWriter II was designed in accordance with Apple's Snow White design language . In 1986, it received

1428-506: The basic LA36 line into a wide variety of dot matrix printers. The DEC LA50 was designed to be a "compact, dot matrix" printer. When in graphic mode (as opposed to text mode), the printhead can generate graphic images. When in ( bitmap ) graphics mode, the LA50 can receive and print Sixel graphics format. The Centronics 101 (introduced 1970) was highly innovative and affordable at its inception. Some selected specifications: The IBM 5103

1479-450: The carriage return period, characters were buffered for subsequent printing at full speed during a catch-up period. The two-tone buzz produced by 60-character-per-second catch-up printing followed by 30-character-per-second ordinary printing was a distinctive feature of the LA36, quickly copied by many other manufacturers well into the 1990s. Most efficient dot matrix printers used this buffering technique. Digital technology later broadened

1530-485: The characters of a line while the print head moves horizontally. The printing speed of serial dot matrix printers with moving heads varies from 30 to 1550 characters per second (cps) . In a considerably different configuration, so called line dot matrix printers or line matrix printers use a fixed print head almost as wide as the paper path utilizing a horizontal line of thousands of pins for printing. Sometimes two horizontally slightly displaced rows are used to improve

1581-534: The cost of speed. Dot matrix printing is typically distinguished from non-impact methods, such as inkjet , thermal , or laser printing , which also use a bitmap to represent the printed work. These other technologies can support higher dot resolutions and print more quickly, with less noise. Unlike other technologies, impact printers can print on multi-part forms , allowing multiple copies to be made simultaneously, often on paper of different colors. They can also employ endless printing using continuous paper that

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1632-511: The earlier Hellschreiber, it still used electromechanical means of coding and decoding, but it used a start-stop method ( asynchronous transmission ) rather than synchronous transmission for communication. In 1956, while he was employed at Telefonbau und Normalzeit GmbH ( TuN , later called Tenovis ), the device was offered to the Deutsche Bundespost (German Post Office), which did not show interest. When Preikschat emigrated to

1683-482: The effective dot density through interleaving. While still line-oriented, these printers for the professional heavy-duty market effectively print a whole line at once while the paper moves forward below the print head. Line matrix printers are capable of printing much more than 1000 cps, resulting in a throughput of up to 800 pages per hour. A variation on the dot matrix printer was the cross hammer dot printer, patented by Seikosha in 1982. The smooth cylindrical roller of

1734-568: The importance of industrial design excellence to the quality of life and economy". Every year, designers and corporations submit entries into the competition in many categories. The program was established in 1980. The IDEA winners are honored at annual ceremonies (such as the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) / IDSA CONNECTING '07 World Design Congress in San Francisco , CA ) and awarded with

1785-399: The longest-running Apple product in history. On the 2000 album A Spectrum of Infinite Scale , surf-rock band Man or Astro-man? included the song "A Simple Text File". The song is a recording of the sound of an ImageWriter II printing a carefully crafted file. An ImageWriter can also be seen the music video for Marilyn Manson 's " The Dope Show ." ImageWriter LQ ( L etter Q uality)

1836-427: The paper, much like the print mechanism on a typewriter . However, unlike a typewriter or daisy wheel printer , letters are drawn out of a dot matrix, and thus, varied fonts and arbitrary graphics can be produced. Each dot is produced by a tiny metal rod, also called a "wire" or "pin", which is driven forward by the power of a tiny electromagnet or solenoid , either directly or through small levers (pawls). Facing

1887-406: The printer's built-in (ROM) typefaces. The desktop impact printer was gradually replaced by the inkjet printer . When Hewlett-Packard 's US patent 4578687   expired on steam-propelled photolithographically produced ink-jet heads in 2004, the inkjet mechanism became available to the printer industry. For applications that did not require impact (e.g. carbon-copy printing), the inkjet

1938-628: The process, they designed the parallel electrical interface that was to become standard on most printers until it began to be replaced by the Universal Serial Bus ( USB ) in the late 1990s. DEC was a major vendor, albeit with a focus on use with their PDP minicomputer line. Their LA30 30 character/second (CPS) dot matrix printer, the first of many, was introduced in 1970. In the mid-1980s, dot-matrix printers were dropping in price, and began to outsell daisywheel printers , due to their higher speed and versatility. The Apple ImageWriter

1989-722: The razor blade) has reduced the value of the low cost for the printer: "a price per milliliter on par with liquid gold" for the ink/toner. In June 1978, the Epson TX-80/TP-80, an 8-pin dot-matrix printer mainly used for the Commodore PET computer, was released. This and its successor, the 9-pin MX-80/MP-80 (introduced in 1979–1980), sparked the popularity of impact printers in the personal computer market. The MX-80 combined affordability with good-quality text output (for its time). Early impact printers (including

2040-435: The ribbon and the paper is a small guide plate named ribbon mask holder or protector, sometimes also called butterfly for its typical shape. It is pierced with holes to serve as guides for the pins. The plate may be made of hard plastic or an artificial jewel such as sapphire or ruby . The portion of the printer that contains the pin is called the print head. When running the printer, it generally prints one line of text at

2091-431: Was a 30 character per second dot matrix printing terminal introduced in 1970 by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) of Maynard, Massachusetts It printed 80 columns of uppercase-only 7 × 5 dot matrix characters across a unique-sized paper. The printhead was driven by a stepper motor and the paper was advanced by a noisy solenoid ratchet drive. The LA30 was available with both a parallel interface (LA30-P) and

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2142-419: Was a low-cost alternative to the vastly more expensive LaserWriter . Another third-party innovation was an add-on peripheral called the ThunderScan, which allowed the printer to work as a low-cost optical scanner (in which the scanner mechanism temporarily replaced the ink ribbon cartridge). The ImageWriter II also supported an optional motorized sheet feeder that could feed cut-sheet paper. The ImageWriter II

2193-431: Was a popular consumer dot matrix printer in the 1980s until the mid-1990s. In the 1970s and 1980s, dot matrix impact printers were generally considered the best combination of cost and versatility, and until the 1990s were by far the most common form of printer used with personal and home computers . Increased pincount of the printhead from 7, 8, 9 or 12 pins to 18, 24, 27, or 36 permitted superior print quality, which

2244-604: Was a serious issue, as the dot-matrix text's readability would rapidly degrade with each photocopy generation. Initially, third-party printer enhancement software offered a quick fix to the quality issue. General strategies were: Some newer dot-matrix impact printers could reproduce bitmap images via "dot-addressable" capability. In 1981, Epson offered a retrofit EPROM kit called Graftrax to add this to many early MX series printers. Banners and signs produced with software that used this ability, such as Broderbund 's Print Shop , became ubiquitous in offices and schools throughout

2295-412: Was compatible with Microsoft Windows -based computers using the operating systems' included C-Itoh 8510 driver, while color support was available through third-party drivers. The only requirement was an available serial port and appropriate interface cable. Despite the introduction of the inkjet StyleWriter in 1991, the ImageWriter II kept selling. It continued in production until late 1996, making it

2346-443: Was essentially a re-packaged 9-pin dot matrix printer from C. Itoh Electronics (model C. Itoh 8510, with a modified ROM and pinout), released the same year. It was introduced as a replacement for the earlier parallel-based Apple Dot Matrix Printer /DMP (also a C. Itoh model) and, while primarily intended for the Apple II , worked across Apple's entire computer product line. The ImageWriter could produce images as well as text, up to

2397-456: Was moved by a much-more-capable servo drive using a DC electric motor and an optical encoder / tachometer . The paper was moved by a stepper motor. The LA36 was only available with a serial interface but unlike the earlier LA30, no fill characters were required. This was possible because, while the printer never communicated at faster than 30 characters per second, the mechanism was actually capable of printing at 60 characters per second. During

2448-518: Was necessary for success in Asian markets to print legible CJKV characters . Epson's 24-pin LQ-series rose to become the new de facto standard, at 24/180 inch (per pass – 7.5 lpi). Not only could a 24-pin printer lay down a denser dot-pattern in a single pass, it could simultaneously cover a larger area and print more quickly. Although the text quality of a 24-pin was still visibly inferior to

2499-528: Was succeeded by the ImageWriter II in late 1985. A wider version of the ImageWriter, sold as ImageWriter 15", was introduced in January 1984. It allowed printing to 12" wide as well as to 15" wide paper. This version of ImageWriter remained in production for more than a year after the ImageWriter II was introduced. Production was eventually discontinued in January 1987. In 1984 Thunderware introduced

2550-404: Was superior in nearly all respects: comparatively quiet operation, faster print speed, and output quality almost as good as a laser printer. By 1995, inkjet technology had surpassed dot matrix impact technology in the mainstream market and relegated dot matrix to niche applications. As of 2021 , dot matrix impact technology remains in use in devices and applications such as: Thermal printing

2601-448: Was the only IBM printer that could be attached to the IBM 5100 , an early day portable computer. Printing was 8 DPI, 10 pitch, 6 LPI, and capable of printing bidirectionally from a 128-character set. Two models were offered: 80 and 120 characters per second. Near Letter Quality mode—informally specified as almost good enough to be used in a business letter —endowed dot-matrix printers with

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