Alice Averlong🏳️⚧️Wow, I'd forgotten how AMAZINGLY SLOW dot matrix printers were when you're trying to print graphics
It took 15 minutes to finish the whole page.
Which it printed incorrectly so I have to DO IT AGAIN!
Dr. Christopher Kunz@foone Had the same issue overnight, just in 3D. Annoying!
Jos Dingjan@foone A long time ago, first year uni, I thought it a good idea to print a report on my Epson 9-pin dot matrix printer.
It had formulas.
It had graphics.
It had bold text.
I had chosen highest print quality.
It. Took. Hours.
to print the bloody thing. And all the while it was making that blood-curdling circular-saw-ripping-through-concrete-tiles sound. While I wanted to go to bed, because hey, hours.
Ada@ada good question! Based on the windows print spool it's only sending new data every couple lines, so I think it's cool off?
Though it might just be slowly updating the page
Christian Berger DECT 2763
Solarbird 
@foone In school I had a Commodore 1526 printer that had one (1) re-definable character that you could redefine once (1ce) per line and I wrote a printer driver to use it as a graphics device and if I remember correctly it ran at a little under 30 minutes a page, resulting in a blazing two pages per hour
@foone also that multiple passes per same line is weird on a printer with a normal graphics mode. is the driver having to send subsections of the band?
for a machine calling itself "turbo" it sure is one slow MFer
@moira I put it on high quality graphics mode, so I think it's double-printing some dots to get extra contrast?
and it is pretty fast when you're printing text!
@foone oooh yeah I can see that, those old "near letter quality" dot-matrix printers did a bunch of shenanigans with shit like print-head offsets and double printing in highest quality for line smoothing text modes too
so yeah probably something like that, it's, like, smoothing diagonal lines or something
mal3aby
Joe Cooper 🇺🇦 🍉@foone I'd assumed it'd be impossible to get new ribbons for these old printers, but I guess some of the big brands are still used in commercial settings, and so the consumables are still out there. I think I have an Okidata of some sort in a box, but never tried to use it...I should dig it out and see if I can get ink for it.
∆θ windows xp ready
Kat the Leopardess@foone Oh gods... I have one of these exact models, for printing my clothing/sewing patterns. My printer is about as loud as that, too
Pare
ghosts in the silicon ▒@foone it's like watching a graphing calculator draw a Mandelbrot set. But louder
Robin Syl 🌸
@foone sounds like the intro to an emo song
Wouter Verhelst
Toccata and Fugue in DOT minor - Bach on a DOT MATRIX PRINTER
fnord
Brad Martin@foone not nearly as slow as my old OkiMate color printer 😬