[brudgers]

My next printer will be a 24 pin, wide carriage dot matrix with a tractor feed. Though it seems counterproductive to use a high duty cycle device for the small amount of printing I do, truth is that the racket of an impact printer is a small tradeoff.

It used to be that inkjet would print black with an empty color cartridge. Now, printing something may take hours or days until I get to the store to buy a Yellow...nevermind if I order from Amazon. An impact printer just prints lighter as ink is depleted.

Printing should just work. It doesn't any more. I miss my Star Micronics NX80.

[bzbarsky]

Have you looked into laser printers? I've found that for sporadic printing they're much better than inkjets, and not too expensive as long as you don't want color.

[electromagnetic]

This is what me and my wife did. She bought the same laser printer she has at work for home and it works amazing. It was cheap, and not being caught in the ink racket makes it cheaper.

There's very few instances you actually need to print in colour.

[phyllostachys]

This is what I did. I bought a Brother monochrome laser printer (HD-53??) back in 2012 for use printing out college junk. If memory serves, I was on the starter cartridge for a year or so, In fact, I may still be on the starter cartridge. I can't even remember if I bought a new cartridge.

The total cost has only been about $150 or $200.

[anigbrowl]

I second the advice to just buy a simple business laser printer. I too have had it with inkjets and the refill scam, but a typical laser cartridge is good for thousands of pages. Although I have a technician's nostalgia for dot matrix printers, I can't think of any valid reason to run one for normal home printing needs.

[brudgers]

I'm not nostalgic. Back in 2002, I bought a cheap little Brother laser fax. Refills ran $30 for a few thousand pages; I could make copies; and life was grand. In 2007, the output degraded to crap when the drum died. The cost of a replacement drum was more than I paid originally, so it went to the dumpster. I've pitched a lot of printers over the years. Other than the three I have currently, the only two I gave away in working condition were the Star I bought in 1988 and an Hp 550c [a printer that made pleasant noises unlike the 600 series that succeeded it].

Anyway, I'm tired of pitching printers. Wide carriage allows printing US B size drawings. Tractor feed means not running out of paper in the middle of a job. And impact technology means not thinking about running out of Magenta every time I print something.

I don't want to wait for nozzles to.clean or fusers to heat up. I just want the damn thing printed quick enough that I don't have time to browse HN. It's about flow.

[nwh]

What's the driver support for dot matrix printers like in linux these days?

[brudgers]

Given the business use case, I doubt it is worse than for consumer oriented models.

e.g. http://www.okidata.com/drivers

Also, keeping in mind that dot matrix printers are old hardware, there has been a long time for someone to write a driver:

e.g. http://www.openprinting.org/printer/Oki/Oki-ML-520