[klodolph]

I'd have to disagree with "anything beyond 'does the job' is gravy", because people use these printers for different jobs and some people definitely do care about the quality. Good quality printing is easier to read; the images and diagrams are clearer and easier to understand; etc.

I remember using dot matrix printers. The ink looks faded and uneven, there are often patches of missing ink. Consumer dot matrix printers from the 1980s and 1990s mostly just plain suck, and we knew it.

Laser printers really were a big part of the desktop publishing revolution. We take it for granted today, but that's because the revolution is over, desktop publishing won, and manual typesetting / layout is now extremely niche.