At 08:55 AM 12/11/98 -0000, you wrote:
>Roger wrote, regarding the printer in the HX-20 and AIM-65:
>> As to five heads versus one, you can print five characters at once. Faster
>> printing.
>
>Disregarding the time spent moving the paper, it is slower (5/8 the speed),
>since you are only printing five dots at a time rather than eight. But
>speed wasn't the point.
I always thought that the more common printheads were 9x1 -- that is, a
single column of 9 dots. This moved across the paper printing 8 or so
times for each character. To have 5 sets spaced out would divide your
horizontal print time by 5.
For the HX-20, because it had only one row of dots, you then have to
multiply the time by 9 to get the 5 full characters. So the HX-20 probably
took 9/5 as long or was about twice as slow. It would have been
considerably slower if there were only 1 pin instead of 5 across.
>The real win was just that the mechanism was cheaper than the more common
>eight-vertical-dot mechanisms.
For the HX-20, that may have been very true, since it may have been prior
to Epson getting into buying/building mass quantities of printheads.
--------------------------------------------------------------------- O-
Uncle Roger "There is pleasure pure in being mad
roger_at_sinasohn.com that none but madmen know."
Roger Louis Sinasohn & Associates
San Francisco, California
http://www.sinasohn.com/
Received on Sat Dec 12 1998 - 23:36:27 GMT