Epson LX 300+

...about £10 each for genuine epson ones or as little as £5 for compatible ones.

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QUALITY
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Well it sounds good so far, so whats wrong with it? One thing I really disliked about this printer was its quality. The text produced by the ribbon was very faint, and a grey colour as opposed to black. There was a lot of horizontal banding in most print outs with large white stripes through the ...
...If it is just Epson thats not good with their Dot matrices then I would recommend them to give them up as a bad job and stick to what their good at...inkjet and lasers. Epson still remain my favourite brand of inkjet and laser printers so maybe they should stick with these and abandon the ever ageing method of dot matrix printing...and hopefully other companies will follow!
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We bought this Dot matrix for printing customer orders and basic office print outs, inevtories etc. We got it in the hope it would be cheap to use, with a good output and easy to use, unfortunately we were very wrong.

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WHAT IS A DOT - MATRIX PRINTER?
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Dot matrix printers, known also as impact printers, represent the oldest printing technology, are still the widespread today, grace of it's best cost per page ratio. They use a ribbon, like one would find on a typical type writer and the ink from the ribbon is imprinted onto the page. This printer is one which uses a black and white ribbon, however colour ribbons are available, they consist of 4 smaller colour stripes instead of one large black stripe.

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AVAILIBILITY
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I got this printer a couple of years back and I really can't be sure if they still make it now. I purchased it from PC World but after looking in their stores recently it seems they don't stock this model, or any dot matrix printers for that matter. It seems that these printers are gradually fading out as theres not much demand for them anymore. And, as PC world becomes more and more aimed towards the home computer maybe they no longer stock printers such as these, which are aimed primarily at business use.

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PRICE
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Around the time I bought it, it cost in excess of £100, however I can't imagine them being so much now a days, and they are as little as £10 on ebay if you can pick up a bargain. The price of the ribbons is also quite cheap, averaging about £10 each for genuine epson ones or as little as £5 for compatible ones.

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QUALITY
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Well it sounds good so far, so whats wrong with it? One thing I really disliked about this printer was its quality. The text produced by the ribbon was very faint, and a grey colour as opposed to black. There was a lot of horizontal banding in most print outs with large white stripes through the text. It also had a tendency to shoot random dots of ink or random letters all over the page. The printer also only had the capability of printing five fonts and with about five different sizes.

Another problem I found was with the ribbon itself, the ribbons were really thin and the head unit would often jam. Replacing the ribbons was difficult without covering your hands with black dust and having to take the printer to bits. The ribbons were also rare to find, thes best place was the internet although even then it was difficult to get hold of them, we often found ourselves buying ones of ebay.

The paper feed in the printer was also poor, it took one sheet at a time, and is really better suited to continuos paper rolls. Paper jams were common.

Btw in some of the ratings below, I've had to select an irrelevant answer, for instance picture quality... in actual fact it doesn't print pictures! The printer is purely text only.

The general problems with the printer combined with the poor performance and printing made me dislike the printer more and more, sometimes i felt like throwing it out of the window! It was very unreliable, with days when sometimes it wouldn't even turn itself on after a year or so, it had obviously got tired but surely modern day printers last more than a year!?

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INSTALLATION
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I found the printer very difficult to install. It worked quite well on older computers but we spent ages trying to install it on some of the newer machines and it just wouldn't take it. Neither would the macs take it. It also made it difficult, the fact that it runs on parallel as opposed to most new printers which run on USB. This also means its not compatible with imacs as they only have 2 USB ports and no parallel printer ports.

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DESIGN
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As with most dot matrix, the design of this printer was hardly desirable. Its simply a beige box with a few lights and a clear plastic lid (which broke after a few months as the catches came loose) There are a few buttons on the front and a few lights indicating which font is selected etc. The design is essentially very basic, however its understandable that these are made purely for business so image is relatively unimportant.

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OVERALL
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Well to be quite honest, I'm not really a fan of dot matrix printers anyway, so perhaps I was slightly biased from the beginning, I have not bought one since this I can assure you. I think the technology is very outdated compared with inkjets, yet they are still more expensive than some of the basic inkjets, I fail to understand this. The outdated technology, in my opinion makes these printers useless compared with inkjets, their capabilities and performance are poor, however I'm basing my judgement on one printer, maybe other dot matrix's are better. If it is just Epson thats not good with their Dot matrices then I would recommend them to give them up as a bad job and stick to what their good at...inkjet and lasers. Epson still remain my favourite brand of inkjet and laser printers so maybe they should stick with these and abandon the ever ageing method of dot matrix printing...and hopefully other companies will follow!
 

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