A fascinating printer: The Star SJ-144MC

[olePigeon]

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-Laser-quality-Color-Printer-Star-SJC-144-MC-For-Macintosh-New-in-box-/151738281175

If this was only $20, I'd buy it just to play with it.

I Lycosed it on the internets and it's a fascinating printer.  It's a 300 dpi dot matrix.

I didn't even know a dot matrix could even be 300 dpi.  Not only that, but it's color.

I remember the color printing on my Apple ImageWriter, and it was complete rubbish.  Not so much color printing as it was Apple's impression of a 4-year-old's finger painting.

 

[Paralel]

Yeah, 300 DPI on a dot matrix, who knew? The printhead must not only be rather advanced, but rather unique I would imagine. It probably also goes rather slowly and makes the most horrific noise.

 

[techknight]

I think the craziest printer I owned was a Phaser 300 wax printer. 

That thing was fun, until something went wrong with the mechanism and ended up getting rid of it. 

that thing was a very heavy hoss! Also learned to leave the thing on. the minute you power cycled it, it would waste half the wax... 

 

[Tiptoeturtle]

The description on the box claims it is laser quiet (i.e. as quiet as a laser printer).

The product code on the ribbon is T144-CL.

The T could be an abbreviation for Thermal (as in thermal transfer) and the CL could denote colour.

This sounds similar to an Apple Scribe printer, which was also thermal transfer, colour, and high resolution (from memory).

The print head uses heat not impact pins to shift the ink (wax) onto the paper.

The catch is perhaps (= probably) you can no longer buy ribbons for either, and the ribbons can only be used once, perhaps 30 pages per ribbon. The black ribbon is coated with a black wax-like substance which is melted off onto the paper or even onto overhead transparency film (like a heavy rigid clear plastic). The colour ribbon has segments of alternating colours cyan, magenta, ? each about 8 inches long a b c a b c a b c throughout the length of the ribbon.

They are very good for colour transparency production.

This is only guesswork on my part, I have no first hand experience of the Star printer for sale.

 

[sstaylor]

I remember selling a similar printer back in the 90s; I don't recall whether it was a Star or some other brand.

They were cheap, quick and quiet, and the print quality was good.  Color pictures showed some banding, but not too bad.

Then the inkjets got better, lasers got cheaper, and these printers were outclassed.  Very cool though.

 

[NJRoadfan]

Our first 486 came with a 360dpi Star dot matrix. Any 24-pin printer can do that resolution, but its SLOW since it has to do double passes to do the higher resolution. I think Epson's later LQ dot matrix models could do 360dpi as well.

 

[Gorgonops]

An early popular printer using the same technology was the Okidata Okimate 10:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okimate_10

These printers sucked. They were quiet, I'll give them that, but they were horribly wasteful of "ribbon". According to a Creative Computing review of this Star printer a color cartridge lasted a whopping eight pages and was NOT cheap.

 

[Tiptoeturtle]

Another one was the IBM "Quietwriter", printed very nicely, but the ribbon could only be used once.

 

[mopar300m]

I had a Star Micronics printer connected to my Apple IIe when I was young. It was a workhouse, it printed out 1000's of pages over the years. I forget the model but it was a 9 pin model and extremely noisy. I remember lusting after an Imagewriter II that my school had. It was much quieter and could take a color ribbon.

 

[poobah]

That looks an awful lot like a re-badged Alps MD-1000, which was a really cool printer that worked a lot like tiptoeturtle described, except that each color was a separate ribbon (C,Y,M,K)

And yeah, good luck finding ribbons =D

 

[NJRoadfan]

The later Alps MD-5000 and 5500 had quite a following. They could print using white (!) and foil ribbons. My high school had one, it was a very interesting printer. Quality was decent, but running costs were high. It was popular with t-shirt transfer makers.

http://www.alps-printer.com/