I sold my daisy wheel—a printer that prints like a high-priced electric typewriter—and replaced it with a plebeian dot matrix machine.

Why? Because all printers, especially my 1975-vintage daisy, are a series of lousy trade-offs.

And one of the trade-offs was about to be my solvency.

The old daisy wheel cost a mere $650 used—quite a bargain for a machine whose latest models go for several thousand dollars—and Anderson Jacobson didn’t charge for minor adjustments if I lugged in the bulky printer myself. AJ, however, kept after me to get a $450-a-year service contract.

Then, one day, a printed circuit board conked out, and the replacement board and some other work came to $300.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I told the crew at Anderson Jacobson. “Three hundred dollars for a printer that cost me $675 originally?”

No, Anderson Jacobson wasn’t out to gyp me. Quite honestly, the people there had intended to make their money off me through the service contract; and that would have been fine for a company that needed a heavy-duty, industrial-quality printer to pound away, day after day, around the clock, without stopping. But for a lone free-lance writer? However fast I typed, I could never give them the amount of business for which its makers had designed it.

So like destitute parents searching for the right foster home for their children, I looked for better, more affluent surroundings for my printer.

I asked for, and got, $650 for the printer with a tractor feed thrown in for free—it lets you use big stacks of perforated computer paper without stuffing in new sheets when you reach the end of the page. The new owner, a Washington consultant, understood. He wasn’t just buying a printer; he was buying his right to an Anderson Jacobson service contract.

My AJ’s successor was the Microprism Model 480, a sleek, plastic-covered machine that took up less space on my tabletop than some typewriters.

In a dot-matrix printer like the 480, little pins hit the ribbon, making impressions on the paper. An “A” is one series of pins, a “B” another, and so on. The quality normally isn’t any match for the daisy wheel’s, even though the price may be much lower than a daisy going the same speed. “Prints like a daisy, costs like a matrix!” Integral Data Systems touted the Model 480. That was stretching matters.

The letters from my next printer, a Panasonic KX-P1092, could almost pass for a typewriter’s. It sold discounted at a local store for $489, just a few dollars more than Anderson Jacobson wanted for its one-year maintenance contract.

Here’s what else I could have chosen—rightly or not:

1. Another daisy wheel machine. The daisy wheel is plastic or metal and looks vaguely like some flowers, with many strokes radiating from the center. The spokes contain letters and numbers, and your computer tells what spoke the printer should strike—which it does with a little hammer. Run a noisy daisy wheel at one in the morning in a thin-walled apartment with an early-rising neighbor on the other side and you may get a not-so-friendly visit from the police or zoning department.

2. A laser printer. Typically, it works a bit like some copying machines, with your computer controlling the printed image rather than a document you put in front of a mirror. This wasn’t the choice for me; laser printers at the time went for several thousand dollars up. By now, however, the price may be much lower. Political fund-raisers love the nice quality that lasers can add to slick letters saying how badly they need your money.

3. A thermal-transfer printer. This uses patterns of heat to arrange the images on special paper; it’s quiet. Normally, the paper can be expensive, and the printing quality is poor; so thermal printers were also out of the runningrunning for me. Later, however, IBM introduced its Quietwriter printer, which prints beautifully on ordinary paper.

4. An ink-jet printer. This kind literally squirts ink against the paper in patterns forming letters and numbers; and the noise level is low, maybe 50 decibels, compared to 65 or more that a daisy wheel might inflict. What a boon to apartment dwellers and people in already-noisy offices.

While I was shopping for the Anderson Jacobson’s replacement, I didn’t take ink jets very seriously because of the broken-up letters that came from them. A year later, however, I talked to Richard Sugden, a Wyoming M.D., the owner of a PT-88 ink-jet from Siemens, selling in the $900 range, who may have had a limited solution.

He used the 88 with a special printing program called Fancy Font and high-quality paper that soaked up the ink neatly.

The program slowed his printer down to a fraction of the usual 160 characters per second but greatly improved his print even if it still couldn’t pass for a daisy wheel’s. You can also team up Fancy Font with some dot-matrix machines, especially those from Epson. Then you can print in a number of sizes and styles, including “olde English.” Don’t overdo. “Fancy,” as its makers joke in a printing sample, “may either kill or cure.”

In printer shopping for myself, I used these criteria:

Yes, actually I could have afforded a new daisy—one of those $450-$1,000 models.

The problem was that most crept along at less than 20 characters per second. That sounds fast, maybe 200 words a minute; it isn’t. You must redo an entire page if you want perfect typing but wish to make one change in material already printed; you can’t just white out the wrong word and stick in the correct one as you can with a typewriter. Often, after completing a supposedly final version, I see many changes I should have made on-screen. Somehow my editing eyes are sharper with paper.

People less fallible than I can make do with 20 characters per second. They get everything printed right the first time.

Then again, if their printing volume is too high, a snaillike printer still will bog them down.

And if they’re using their computer system to store and print notes or records, a faster machine is a must. That’s especially true if you’re churning out nothing but long rows of numbers. If best impressions don’t count, you might consider a high-speed dot matrix capable of more than 150 characters per second—or even 200 or greater.

My Panasonic dot matrix was somewhat of a compromise, with a draft speed advertised at 180 characters per second and a near-letter-quality one of around 33 cps.

WARNING: Please note that advertised speeds may be one-third or more higher than the actual speeds. The advertised speeds may not consider factors such as the time it takes the printer to go from one line to another. This is particularly true the case of unidirectional printers, which print only from left to right rather than in both directions, as do bidirectional printers.

The only real way to judge a printer speed in your application is to try it with your own sample material.

Here’s the hierarchy of printer quality:

1. Draft quality. The letters are too dotty for anything but drafts and correspondence with enemies whose eyes you want to torture.

2. Correspondence quality. It’ll do for a letter to a forgiving friend or business associate.

3. Near-letter quality. You can get away with it for book manuscripts, especially if you already have a contract.

4. Letter quality. That’s typewriter quality.

A friend described my Microprism’s supposed “near-letter quality” as looking like “an upscale grocery store receipt.” It was a long way from a daisy wheel.

Still, Judith Axler Turner, a nationally syndicated computer columnist, says dot matrix might actually help her at times; she can print the letters larger than regular typewritten characters. Her manuscripts command more attention.

A Washington lawyer fared worse using a dot-matrix machine without near-letter quality. A judge threw out his brief.

We dot-matrix plebeians, before buying, should test the print quality on a number of people, especially colleagues or clients. Are they happy with the shapes, sizes, and quality of the characters? Do they feel that our dots blend smoothly into each other? Usually, the more pins a dot-matrix printer has, the better will be the printing. Many dot-matrix printers in late 1984 had a matrix of seven-by-nine wires. In 1984 Epson was selling the $1,500 LQ-1500 with twice that density and “letter-quality characters to rival fine office typewriters.” I looked one over. The typewriters were still winning.

Sales reps will bill the LQ-1500 and many other dot matrixes as being capable of both (a) lightning speeds with draft-print quality and (b) slower speeds with good quality. Is it “good” enough for you? If not, consider buying a speedy dot matrix or ink jet for routine work and a daisy wheel for the times you want the best impression. The combined cost may be lower than that of a super-duper dot matrix.

If you’re doing serious work with graphics, look for a printer capable of reproducing details as well as a good computer monitor does. Daisy wheels won’t suffice because of the tremendous number of strikes; doing one dot at a time is incredibly slow, and their preformed characters don’t include the variety of patterns that good graphics require. You really need an ink jet, dot matrix, or other alternative.

With printer technology advancing so rapidly, I didn’t want to sink much into a machine—hence, the $489 Panasonic. Sometime in the 1980s I’ll forsake my cheapie dot matrix for a good ink-jet, thermal-transfer, or laser printer when the price is down.

When pondering costs, don’t just look at a printer’s price tag. What about ribbons? How many pages will they print? And how much do they sell for? My IDS ribbons listed for around $12 apiece, but luckily I could get around that by (1) buying at a discount place and (2) eventually purchasing a little machine called a MacInker, which, for less than a dime, let me reink a ribbon. It’s messy. Don’t inflict a MacInker on a Fortune 500 secretary, or any secretary, but think about one, maybe, as a way of being frugal at home. The MacInker is available from Computer Friends, 6415 SW Canyon Court, Suite #10, Portland, Oregon 97221. The telephone number is 1-800/547-3303, or 503/297-2321. The gadget as of mid-1984 was selling for around $60 if you included ink and shipping charges.

I wanted to be able to churn out a book manuscript in one weekend without overwhelming the printer.

Before you buy a printer, ask the manufacturer if it can handle not only your typical workload but also your peak one.

Cheaper printers may overheat—just when you most need them.

A printer is an electromechanical device. That’s a fancy way of saying it may break down a lot.

An electromechanical device, after all, is partly mechanical—which makes it less reliable than the gizmos in your computer system that are purely electronic.

If you can afford backup machines, naturally the repair record won’t be as crucial, but no matter what, do compare statistics on the mean time between failures. Remember, they’re like EPA ratings for automobiles. They’re wrong, frequently, and may not apply to the printer you end up with. But don’t shrug them off entirely.

My daisy—with the little hammer pounding away—was too noisy for the late hours. Older dot matrixes also can be offenders; they can almost shriek with high-pitched sounds. Some of the newer ones may be better behaved. Sharing an office-apartment or working from an ordinary office, however, you might buy a sound-muffling box and wrestle with pulling paper in and out of it.

When good, cheap ink jets and laser printers hit the market, these noise hassles will end.

“Will it underline?” I asked. And would it offer boldface, the dark, heavy print that books often use for emphasis.

And what about other special features? How about proportional spacing, for instance, which prints the “M” wider than a “j”—making the type look more like a book’s. That could make the print more readable.

Another question is, “Does the printer offer justification?” It’s really a software issue. But we’ll group it here with the other special features.

Justification evens out the spacing of both the right and left margins, though that’s a mixed blessing. Justified margins look more impressive. But ragged right margins, the normal typewriter kind, guide the eye more easily and may be better for long reports as opposed to short letters. I did not justify this manuscript. But justification is just the ticket for correspondence with the status conscious.

In the case of all these special features, keep remembering to ask:

1. Does the printer offer them no matter what computer or program you use?

2. If not, will your hardware and software let you use the features?

3. For free, will the store modify your computer system to make the features available to you?

4. Will your desired combinations of features work simultaneously? Unfortunately, with my software, anyway, the Microprism 480 couldn’t use boldface and proportional spacing at once.

1. Can you use a standard cable to connect the printer and the computer?

2. If not, can the store make one up for you? At what cost?

Remember, it isn’t enough for the cables to plug in. You also want the right wires going to the right pins and for the computer and printer to be on speaking terms electronically.

To connect up with a printer physically and electronically, a computer uses a port—nothing more than (a) a plug or socket and (b) the gizmos that let your machine exchange bits and bytes with the outside world.

“The outside world” may be a modem, which connects up with a phone, or it may be simply your printer.

Two common styles of ports are serial and parallel. Data passes through serial ports a bit at a time; through parallel ports, it passes eight bits or more at once.

Serial ports commonly use an industry standard, the RS-232, which is a kind of socket together with the related electronics. As with “IBM compatibility,” this “industry standard” often can be elusive. One brand’s RS-232 may differ from another’s.

The Kaypro has both a serial and parallel port, and with the Anderson Jacobson, I had to wrestle with plugs whenever I used the modem, since it and the Anderson Jacobson both required the serial port.

In between printing one of the last drafts of this manuscript today, I’m adding another criterion—whether a printer has a buffer.

A buffer in this case is just some memory, in the printer, that lets your computer pump a letter or report into the machine in a fairly short time. Then you can return to other computer work while the printer runs. You can of course buy a buffer if your machine lacks one and you’re sadistic enough to deprive your secretary of a good excuse for a coffee break. Wait. Come to think of it, your secretary herself might appreciate a buffer if she’s trying to keep a nine to five job nine to five.

You needn’t have buffering by way of your printer. Some programs, such as Word Perfect, even let you “schedule” several printing jobs from different documents on your disk while you’re still writing.