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Printer and Photocopier Troubleshooting and Repair Collection
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How Daisy Wheel Printer Works
These may still turn up at yard sales and flea markets but have virtually disappeared due to slow speed and limited flexibility with respect to graphics. In their defense, for basic text, their quality is superb for a low cost printer.
Instead of pins, these use a wheel with all the possible characters molded on 'leaves' around the perimeter. The wheel spins to the correct character position and a hammer than taps the leaf to impress the character (via a ribbon) on the paper. Carriage and printhead movement is similar to that of dot matrix printers.
...The PS1215 shined brilliantly in our color photo tests. On our PC, we used the included photo printing software to
select our own high-resolution digital photos and to position them in the software's predefined page layouts.
Samples were a bit slow to print--a typical 8-by-10 required 4 minutes and 28 seconds--but the output was superb
on HP's premium glossy photo paper (sample pack included). Our samples displayed rich and accurate color,
perfect register, fine detail, and realistic skin tones. There was no visible banding or smearing and only
the faintest hint of pixelation.
Read more...
Some history/trivia:
The daisy wheel printer (interestingly) was patented before World War II! It was GE or a GE engineer, but only commercialized by Diablo, which was later bought by Xerox in its expansion to California. Later spinoff was Qume, and then lot of companies got into it, some Japanese, some local (California). Daisy wheel technology was killed by the laser printer becoming cheap and having better quality. Original impetus for it was speed: IBM Selectric was able to print at 10 char/s (good for 110 baud modems!). It moved the whole ball (big inertia). Daisy wheel only moves one spoke, (to print one character) and got 30 chars/s.
Near the end of the era, 'on the fly' printers got as fast as 80 char/sec.
Other Related Articles:
How Inkjet Printer Works
How Laser Printer and Photocopier Works
Primer Basics
Some Inkjet History
Inkjet Types (from Xerox perspective)
Response Times of Resistance Heater Elements
How Many Colors Can One Get from Inkjet printer
Why are the inkjet primers RBY (red, blue, and yellow)
Inkjet Printer Ink