Re: Help buying Economic Printer
On Mon, Jul 09, 2007 at 05:36:09PM -0000, ispmarin wrote:
> Hello all at Debian User.
>
> I am looking for a printer with very low per page cost (catridges,
> tonners etc) and not very expensive to buy. I dont care if it is laser
> or deskjet. Performance is not a issue (it can be slow), and the
> quality of the page dont need to be high (I will print mainly texts
> and code, and very occasionally a graph), and can be black and white.
> Does anybody has some suggestions?
>
As far as I've been able to see (and by their prevalence in
PointOfSale), its hard to beat a dot-matrix. Slow, yes; noisy, perhaps;
low-res, NearLetterQuality; black-and-white, OK. Inexpensive: over the
lifetime (decades) yes, upfront-price somewhere between an inkjet and a
laser. They are the cheapest to operate: new ribbon under $10 good for
about 50,000 pages. You can either use tractor-feed paper (slightly
more than loose) or loose reams if you have a sheet-feeder bin.
For plain text, they should all work. For postscript via gs with a
suitable print filter (cups, LPRNG + ?, lpd + ?), they also work just
fine. 9-pin have lower res, a bit faster, and last more decades than
24-pin.
To get an idea of what I'm talking about, look at the Epsons on their
web site, and look at eBay for bigger used beasts that (Caviot Emptor)
still have some years in them; you'll probably pay more for shipping
than for the printer. You may even be able to get one for a few bucks
at a used computer store.
For example, my printer was given to me when the owner got rid of their
IBM PC Jr. Its an IBM PC Graphics Printer, as pictured on the press
release anouncing the origional IBM PC. Still runs, ribbons are
off-the-shelf. The only problem is that the little do-hicky that winds
the ribbon broke off two owners ago.
Good luck,
Doug.
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