Talk:Dot matrix printer

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[edit] sound artist

Removed the following:

Due to dot matrix printers recently falling into disuse, Sue Harding, an Australian sound artist, has used the characteristic sounds of dot matrix printers in action in her work.

I'm struggling to see what the significance of this is to dot matrix printers. IIRC, sound artists have used all manner of sounds, from flushing toilets to industrial jackhammers to whales mating, as part of their constructions. Has Sue Harding's work using the printer sounds become particularly well-known? --Robert Merkel 13:20, 31 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] NLQ vs 24-pin

I can't remember -- did 24-pin printers come first, or printer 'NLQ'? I know third-party software offered NLQ-like capabilities before NLQ-fonts were built into printers. Regardless, I do know Epson eventually added NLQ to its 9-pin printers.

"NLQ" came first I think, but it was a rather a marketing stretch. 24-pin printers produced much better output than 9-pin printers in NLQ mode. --Robert Merkel 23:03, 21 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] special effect

I'm looking for photo software that will create a dot matrix effect with jpeg and other files 05:06, 8 January 2006 (UTC)whicky1978 05:11, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Incorrect figure, re:wear on head?

Is this sentence correct?-

After about a million characters, even with tungsten blocks and titanium pawls, the printing becomes too unclear to read.

If we assume that an 80-column printout also has 80 lines, that gives (potentially) 1600 (oops... thanks Atlant) 6400 characters per page. At one-third full, let's say that's 500 2000 characters per page on average.

One million characters is only 2000 500 pages. That's the equivalent of just four normal-sized packs a single ream of A4/legal paper.

This sounds improbably low.

Fourohfour 20:14, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

'Sounds low to me, too, but the printers I've dealt with have all had "jeweled" (garnet? sapphire?) heads and (I think) steel wires so the wear on the guideplate was reduced. But I'd guess that these printers printed far more than your calculated 2000 pages. Heck, I used to print my tech docs on them and they ran hundreds of pages at far more than 500 characters/page, more like 3 or 4 thousand characters/page.
Atlant 20:36, 23 February 2006 (UTC)
I've removed the figure; doing the arithmetic correctly reveals one million characters to be actually just 500 pages (one ream), and there's no way that's correct, even in the cheapest, nastiest dot-matrix. Fourohfour 12:11, 24 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] storage devices

which one storage device is best to use(hdd, dat,zip,cd'setc) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Arun.mahlan (talk • contribs) .

Depends what you want to do with it!
ZIP disks/drives are quite old-fashioned now; the only reason for using them is to share files with someone else who uses ZIP disks/drives.
As for the others, they all have different areas of use; but Wikipedia talk pages are really intended for discussing article content. There are other online forums better suited to discussing your choice of storage media. All the best! Fourohfour 17:31, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Dot matrix example text caption

Please do not carry out editing debates in the body of the article - even as comments. This is where that discussion belongs.

What's going on here is that the title is poorly worded. One person reads "The unenlarged region" to mean "The entire image" (which could easily be 4.6 centimeters - and nobody would remotely imagine could be 4.5 millimeters!) - the other person reads it as "The unenlarged version of the letter 'e' in the image" - which couldn't remotely be 4.5 centimeters - and for which 4.5 millimeters is probably reasonable.

So - stop arguing about it - and rewrite the text to make the interpretation of this less ambiguous. That is why we use the 'talk' page and not the article for these discussions.

SteveBaker 16:19, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

Thank you -- you correctly diagnosed (and corrected) the problem. I've now made one small amplification and one small correction to that new caption.
Atlant 16:34, 17 November 2006 (UTC)
Cool - your addition helps even more. Thanks! SteveBaker 16:41, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

A few points;

  1. Steve; I *did* "stop arguing and rewrite the text" to make it clearer; admittedly, Atlant's version (specifically "entire image") is simpler and cleaner, but please don't imply that I didn't make the effort.
  2. I apologise for tweaking Atlant's version; the only problem I had was that "4.5cm" could be taken to mean either width or height. If I made it less clear again, please feel free to rewrite it.
  3. You're right that most of the stuff in the edit summary and inline comment should have gone on the talk page. However, inclusion of brief comments (e.g. <!--# 4.5 CENTimetres is correct; see [[talk]]-->) is reasonable where an issue is likely to raise its head again.
  4. Normally, if I have doubts about a figure, and I think it sounds "probably reasonable", I avoid jumping to conclusions and raise it on the talk page first.

Anyway, this edit probably was genuine- but it was still wrong, and passed uncommented into the edit history. Big deal? In one sense, no; but it's this sort of minor slippage that builds up and damages Wikipedia. I'd characterise edits such as this one (reverted here) as potentially dangerous, whether or not they're meant to be subtle vandalism. Fourohfour 17:21, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

You might read WP:AGF. Ask yourself - why would someone think that single letter 'e' was 4.5cm across - or conversely who would think all that text would fit into 4.5mm? When you assume that the other editor is working in good faith (as I assumed both of you were) - you rapidly come to the conclusion that rather than vandalism or something equally destructive, that there must be some more fundamental misunderstanding. But in any case, discussions belong here - not in the article and not in edit summaries. SteveBaker 00:38, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
(1) I'm well aware of AGF, thank you. Please (a) reread my comment above "this edit probably was genuine" and (b) note that in the other case here, I used a qualified newbie "test" notice instead of "blatantvandal", despite my suspicions.
Please note that criticism of a particular edit does *not* imply non-AGF. "Good faith" (as used here) simply means that the user wasn't *intentionally* vandalising/inserting-POV/etc. Jumping to conclusions about what is and isn't right is still "good faith", but doesn't put it beyond criticism.
(2) Yes, I did realise that the sentence was potentially unclear; why would I have rewritten it otherwise? The rewrite wasn't perfect either; but the point here is that I recognised the problem. I already told you this.
(3) Discussions belong on the talk page? Sure, but you already said that, and I already agreed with you(!) The example comment I gave- <!--# CENTimetres is correct; see [[talk]]-->- doesn't constitute a discussion, and I'd only advocate the use of comments if the problem is likely to recur.
Fourohfour 11:44, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] References

The only reference listed here is this gigantic timeline of an entire company's contributions to the technological world. However, I've done ctrl f (searched) the site for either impact or dot (by itself) to see where it could be used as a source and have found nothing. I realize that this is the company that pioneered the device, but, would anyone have any more useful sources to cite from? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by R0cko (talk • contribs) 05:26, 24 January 2007 (UTC).