Citizen Printer

what is a dot matrix printer?

how does a dot matrix printer work?

Public Comments

1. I think this kind of printer is obsolete now. It only print with black ink and is commonly used in offices in the past.
2. the old style printers you used to get-they had a big ink ribbon in them and it worked a bit like a big typewriter, punching lots of little holes through the ribbon in order to create the text/image. It was also quite noisy when it printed. The ones you get today are laser printers.
3. I was going to try and describe this myself but this is a much better description ... A dot matrix printer' or impact matrix printer refers to a type of computer printer with a print head that runs back and forth on the page and prints by impact, striking an ink-soaked cloth ribbon against the paper, much like a typewriter. Unlike a typewriter or daisy wheel printer, letters are drawn out of a dot matrix, and thus, varied fonts and arbitrary graphics can be produced. Because the printing involves mechanical pressure, these printers can create carbon copies and carbonless copies. Each dot is produced by a tiny metal rod, also called a "wire" or "pin", which is driven forward by the power of a tiny electromagnet or solenoid, either directly or through small levers (pawls). Facing the ribbon and the paper is a small guide plate (often made of an artificial jewel such as sapphire or ruby [1]) pierced with holes to serve as guides for the pins. The moving portion of the printer is called the print head, and when running the printer as a generic text device generally prints one line of text at a time. Most dot matrix printers have a single vertical line of dot-making equipment on their print heads; others have a few interleaved rows in order to improve dot density
4. A dot matrix printer uses a block of pins that quickly punch an ink impregnated ribbon which leaves an imprint of the pins on the paper. The most common in the PC world were 9-pin and 24-pin but Apple's Apple ImageWriter LQ had 27 pins. The head would look something like this, as you can see it is a matrix of dots hence the name dot matrix printer: * * * * * * * * * To print letters certain of the pins are pushed out, say you wanted a C, you would do something like this: * * * * * * * An E would be: * * * * * * * * As you can see this is pretty low resolution so the higher pin count printers, the 24's, were SO much better. Oh, and there were psudo-color dot-matrix printers, I had one. They had a multi-color ribbon instead of just black.
5. 1.)Dot matrix printer are character printers and print one character at atime. whatever the characters or images formed are in dot patterns. 2.) It has a print head that moves horizontally (left to right or right to left) across da paper. Print head contains array of pins dat is activated independent of each other to extend and strike against an inked ribbon to form patterns of dot on da paper. 3.)These printers are normally slow wid speed ranging from 30 to 600 characters per second. 4.)They r cheap in both terms of cost and cost of operation.
6. What vids said, except "dat"=that, "da"=the, "wid"=with
7. Quite generically, a dot matrix printer is one where the printer or can create or has an array of dots, and the host computer or printer controller can control each dot, creating text or images much like a computer screen does. It can be impact, where a pin is struck through an inked ribbon to create dots in the paper, and that is what is usually associated with the term "dot matrix printer". Those have a print head with typically 9 pins, each actuated by a solenoid, driven by the printer controller. The head is attached to a carriage which is driven back and forth across the paper by a motor, and another motor advances the paper through, much like today's inkjet printers. It can be other technologies also. Laser, Inkjet, and thermal (like old fax machines and receipt printers) are also fundamentally dot matrix, since they control the presence or lack of pixels on the paper.