Apple ImageWriter - anyone know why it's so **** heavy?

[CVKealey]

I'm "reorganizing" my storage space due to some impending HVAC work. I happened upon the ImageWriter that my father bought with his 512k Mac in 1985. I've moved it numerous times in the past, but never noticed how oddly heavy it is for a printer. Maybe it's because I'm older/weaker than the last time I hoisted it, but it got me to wondering what makes it so heavy?

I mean, considering the print head's got a bit of mass, the extra weight is probably a benefit (keeps it from shimmying all over the table it's on). Looking at the specs, it's 19 lbs. By comparison, my main household printer is an HP OfficeJet 8600 Plus, which weighs a bit over 27 lbs, but it's easily 3-4 times the physical size of the ImageWriter.

 

[adespoton]

Here's a good manual that may shed some light on the reason: https://ftp.mirrorservice.org/sites...1-1645Z_C-Itoh_8510A_Users_Manual_Nov1982.pdf -- the 8510 was rebranded as the ImageWriter by Apple, but it's the same device.

I seem to remember there's a steel plate in the bottom to counteract the weight of throwing the print head back and forth rather rapidly? They fixed some of this with the ImageWriter II, which ended up being slightly lighter as a result (things ended up on various angles to use momentum against itself).

 

[Byrd]

It was Apple’s workhorse dot matrix and over engineered for reliability. They are the cockroaches of printing equipment, much like commercial dot matrix printers that are still used today.

I still have the sound of an IW II screeching at 3am stuck in my mind printing off high school assignments in "high quality" mode.

 

[chelseayr]

as a footnote re dot matrix workhorse .. and you wonder why many offices would shove the carbon copy printer into a little one-bare-light-bulb-in-the-middle storage-like "closet" room of its own with a good door closing this space off from the hallway/openfloor/whatever .. as that thing screeching off financial invoices/reports countless times all day long is enough to leave someone insane otherwise!

 

[danda]

Complaints about a printer's weight? Get a LaserWriter, which is over 4x heavier than the original ImageWriter, at a whopping 77lbs/35kg!

 

[CVKealey]

Complaints about a printer's weight? Get a LaserWriter, which is over 4x heavier than the original ImageWriter, at a whopping 77lbs/35kg!

I was a copier/printer tech in the 90s, so I know how ridiculously heavy some of those old early laser printers were.

 

[is2scooby]

I read somewhere that there were a couple of versions of the ImageWriter II, and that the later version was a bit lighter by a couple of pounds. I’ve always thought the printer was very heavy also and I’m wondering if the later revision feels any different in practice or if it’s just weight savings on paper (or maybe a myth).