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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

They also kind of suck. I'm not one for "the latest and greatest", but their output quality is atrocious compared to modern printers, they're loud AF, and I'm guessing it may have existed but I never saw a dot matrix that didn't have the perforated edge for feeding.

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Dot matrix can handle regular A4 paper since the late nineties.

They're noisier than ink printers, but non-industrial quality can be pretty reasonable for office-level noises.

Quality certainly isn't on par with laser printers, but for text (both Latin and CJK), it's perfectly clear.

> Dot matrix can handle regular A4 paper since the late nineties.

Did you mean the late 80s'? Growing up we had a Panasonic dot matrix printer from the mid to late 80s that had no trouble with A4 paper.

There was no reason to sell a dot matrix printer that wasn't compatible with tractor feed. Especially when some of the biggest uses of those printers required that stock. Doesn't mean they required tractor feed paper to operate.

A Matrix printer is essentially a typewriter with extra steps and typewriters had been eating any paper for .. a century before?

Are you thinking of Daisy wheel? Dot matrix uses a set of pins arranged in a matrix that they ram forward to press the ribbon against the paper. Daisy wheel uses a raised character glyph and slams it forward into the ribbon. Every typewriter I've used has full glyphs.

I'm thinking of everything working on the principle of smashing an inked ribbon into paper to make markings.

I think that’s a product of their time rather than the dot matrix tech itself. Paper feeding is hard. Tractor strips made it easier.

Pen plotters could accept sheets of A4 and very precisely position them since at least the 80s. I'm surprised that dot-matrix printers didn't adopt similar technologies sooner, though it could be because by the mid-80s dot-matrix printers were the budget option, fanfold paper with the tractor strips was still abundant, and it was much easier to just stick with the cheaply manufacturable technologies rather than take the risk of innovation with a product that wouldn't sell upmarket anyway.

Were A4 plotters that much of a thing? I'd thought plotters were usually larger format (A0-A2 sort of size) for engineering drawings etc. Also iirc they were insanely expensive compared with your standard microcomputer dot-matrix printer.

The most popular pen plotter, and sort of the "holy grail" among hobbyists for this sort of thing, is the HP-7475A, a desktop model which could accept A4 or A3 sized paper (or US A or B size). It cost $1895 upon release in 1984, so yeah, pretty expensive when compared to the $650 an Epson MX-80 (best known dot matrix printer) cost. But there was so much more to the plotter than its paper-feed technology; it was much more a precision instrument in a variety of ways.

Dot Matrix are still used in outdoor / high humidity environments in USA.

A lot of car shops with regular 100% humidity conditions will swear by dot matrix + tractor for feeding paper + printing. Plus, the carbon copy forms are guaranteed to be exact carbon copies which also leads to legal guarantees about copies of paper being provably exactly the same in the court of law.

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