Dot matrix printers may still be used in business (they’re particularly good for printing double and triple-copy receipts, as in the white-yellow or white-yellow-pink kind), but in the home they’ve been gone for decades, replaced by inkjet and laser.
I’m pretty sure nobody will argue with me when I say the dot matrix printer was one of the loudest, most obnoxious home computer peripherals.
Loudness
The loudness is easy enough to understand. NEEEEAAARRRROOW.. NEEEEEEAAAROOW.. NEET NEET, NEEEEEAAARROOW. That’s a very familiar sound to those who remember it.
How loud the printer was mostly depended on the pin count. If you had an early 9-pin-only head, it was slow, and slow meant it took longer to print, meaning the printer made more noise. And woe be to those who had the print head in the open that didn’t have a hard plastic swing-down cover over it, because those were ridiculously loud.
Those with 24-pin head printers had an easier time in the noise department because by that time OEMs recognized the loud-extreme noise factor, and engineered the hard plastic swing-down cover as mentioned above. This cover minimized the noise a great deal, but let’s face it, it was still loud.
(Side note: There were 9, 18 and 24-pin dot matrix printers, but most people skipped right over 18 and went straight from 9 to 24.)
Obnoxious factors
What made dot matrix printers obnoxious where three things.
1. The printer cable was freakin’ huge
A printer cable with a Centronics connector on one or both ends was the absolute longest and thickest cable any home computer owner had back in the day. To put this in perspective, the thickness of the cable is very similar to the one on a modern power strip. Snaking it anywhere with a computer desk setup was a chore at best.
2. Odd-shaped with limited places to put the thing
You can’t put a dot matrix printer on the floor because both the paper and the printer itself would have a coat of dust on it in a less than a week. Putting it on the desk was only acceptable if you had a long table, which most people didn’t.
Because of this, the most popular location for a dot matrix printer was on top of a filing cabinet. Remember, that stupidly thick cable meant the printer had to have some open space around it for wherever it was placed, so the top-of-filing-cabinet location was as "ideal" as you could get.
3. Tractor feed paper
This is undoubtedly the most annoying part of using a dot matrix printer. You know how with a modern laser printer that if you’re printing a large print job, say 25 pages, you can just mash the print button, come back in a few minutes and the job is done? Well, you can’t do that with a dot matrix printer. You have to "babysit" the thing to make sure any large print job goes through where the paper didn’t bunch up on the tractor feed rollers.
Many a dot matrix printer owner has tempted fate with large print jobs. "Okay, I’ve printed a few 20-ish page print jobs here, and it didn’t bunch up, so.. I’ll walk away this one time while it’s printing and everything should be OK when I come back." There was a 50/50 chance whether your print job was nothing but a bunched mess of crinkled paper when you got back. Imagine the joy of coming back and seeing everything turned out OK. Now imagine the disappointment and anger of coming back and seeing page 8 of 20 stopped, crunched, ripped and crinkled and having to do it all over again.
The best dot matrix printer was…?
This is an easy one. Any 24-pin color dot matrix printers from the early 1990s that accepted both tractor-fed and plain-paper-fed sheet feeding. Citizen’s GSX series in particular had some great models:
By the early 90s, dot matrix printers had advanced enough to where they basically had all the features of an inkjet printer, but still used the dot matrix technology.
Info like this is actually important to know for you vintage home computer enthusiasts out there, because if you want that "perfect" dot matrix printer, you really can’t do better than a Citizen from the 1990s. Predictable, reliable (for what it is), prints color (as good as dot matrix can do), the head is completely covered to minimize noise as much as possible, and of course it has a nice business look to it.
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I’ll match your noisy with any of the Teletype machines or the daisy wheels. Different sounds but just as loud. But not many hobbyist users got hold of those.
My best place for placement was a dual dot matrix printer stand. Works wonders now for my MFC brother on the bottom and a paper rack on the top.
I started with the Centonics 101 and added different ones as they became available on the surplus market. Still holding a couple of OKIs and Brothers. Who knows when I may want to print a multiple copy sheet? I would say that I was holding them for friends but current systems don’t even carry parallel ports any more.
You could appreciate the relative quietness of dot matrix if you had ever experienced a thousand line a minute chain running full blast with the cover open.
I had a Star Micronix NX2410 that at $300 in 1992 was a bit pricey but was a very good printer. Nice speed and not too noisy. I had this printer until about 1999. It is still around in a closet and probably works. Only problem would be finding a ribbon for it. That particular printer had very good paper handling capabilities, both tractor or plain paper. It had a detachable guide for plain paper which also worked nicely. The printer had a push tractor which tended to be a bit more reliable and avoided wasting one sheet of paper like pull tractor printers did. It was reliable enough that I used to purchase fanfold paper in boxes of 200 sheets or so and it was unusual for paper to jam even in long jobs. And what about twisting the ribbon over to squeeze some more life out of a ribbon?
At school I remember using Epson LQ-510 printers which were among the best dot-matrix printers I ever used. I also remember a few IBM Proprinter models also at school which were not as good as the Epson but had a feature you don’t see in many printer even today. It had a front slot for feeding single pages. You bypassed the rear psuh tractor by flipping a lever. Very nice feature.
I had a Star Micronix NX2410 that at $300 in 1992 was a bit pricey but was a very good printer. Nice speed and not too noisy. I had this printer until about 1999. It is still around in a closet and probably works. Only problem would be finding a ribbon for it. That particular printer had very good paper handling capabilities, both tractor or plain paper. It had a detachable guide for plain paper which also worked nicely. The printer had a push tractor which tended to be a bit more reliable and avoided wasting one sheet of paper like pull tractor printers did. It was reliable enough that I used to purchase fanfold paper in boxes of 200 sheets or so and it was unusual for paper to jam even in long jobs. And what about twisting the ribbon over to squeeze some more life out of a ribbon?
At school I remember using Epson LQ-510 printers which were among the best dot-matrix printers I ever used. I also remember a few IBM Proprinter models also at school which were not as good as the Epson but had a feature you don’t see in many printer even today. It had a front slot for feeding single pages. You bypassed the rear psuh tractor by flipping a lever. Very nice feature.