IMPACT PRINTERS

6/23/2000

Impact Printers: Printers that press the image of a character onto paper generally by striking the paper through an inked or carbon ribbon. Commonly used in the early days of computers, they were fading from use by the time that PCs came along. The only type that saw much use was the Daisy Wheel printer which arranged letters, numbers and characters around the circumference of a circular "daisy wheel"

Impact printers can have good quality, but they are slow, noisy, and for practical purposes can not do graphics. Technically, dot matrix printers are impact printers, but because they form shapes from a large number of individual dots, they are much more flexible than other impact printers.

Impact printer problems are much the same as dot matrix printer problems -- mostly mechanical in moving paper, the ribbon, or the printhead.