I remember these from the day. Were they thermal printers? Or some kind of ink-jet?
Anybody know if this is battery powered or required a power brick?
Anybody know if this is battery powered or required a power brick?
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Portable Printer?
- Thread starter Mac128
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That looks like a power supply at the right in the box.
They're actually a re-brand of the Citizen PN48 portable printers... they do have a Ni-Cd battery pack in them, or run off the power supply you see in the picture.
There are a couple of ribbons available, single-use or "multi-strike". I'd bet this printer works fine with thermal paper and no ribbon as well. It's a good printer for the occasional printout, with decent resolution (360 DPI).
There are a couple of ribbons available, single-use or "multi-strike". I'd bet this printer works fine with thermal paper and no ribbon as well. It's a good printer for the occasional printout, with decent resolution (360 DPI).
I've got an HP one that supposedly uses a standard battery and works with Mac. I don't have the cable (it uses a big Centronics style printer plug) so I haven't bothered looking for the batteries. It does print a nice test page when you push the right buttons... Can't remember the model number off-hand, but it's definitely a HP DeskJet something or other. It's quite hot... It'd be incredibly Batman to get it working with, say, a Duo... or maybe my IBM Butterfly... Hmm!
I remember searching eBay for the Centronics printer -> Mac serial cable and seeing a bunch of them there for not-much, though obviously without the cable...
I remember searching eBay for the Centronics printer -> Mac serial cable and seeing a bunch of them there for not-much, though obviously without the cable...
I used to port my Epson Stylus 740 around with my iBook. I just put it under my arm. Yes, it's big and needs power, but when I had to take a printer somewhere so I could get work done, the 740 would have to do.
The 740 I think is the most popular printer of the 90's I swear.
The 740 had everything going for it...
-Low price
-Pretty good quality for the time
-Connectors for parallel, serial, and USB
-Special editions to match fruit-flavored iMacs called the 740i (though they were more expensive...which is why I got a plain beige one with my iBook)
-Decent yield per cartridge
My biggest complaint about the printer is that it develops bands over time. (How many other 740 users have had this problem?) I retired mine in 2005 when I got my LaserJet 1020 but I still have it just in case I need it.
-Low price
-Pretty good quality for the time
-Connectors for parallel, serial, and USB
-Special editions to match fruit-flavored iMacs called the 740i (though they were more expensive...which is why I got a plain beige one with my iBook)
-Decent yield per cartridge
My biggest complaint about the printer is that it develops bands over time. (How many other 740 users have had this problem?) I retired mine in 2005 when I got my LaserJet 1020 but I still have it just in case I need it.
Can you visualize it?
The banding problem?
When you print, the area where the ink cartridge hit looks like a "band". If you've ever printed large solid areas on an ImageWriter and know of the little rectangular bands you get, this is the problem the 740 would develop. The trouble is that these bands would frequently get out of alignment (unlike on an ImageWriter). It was also noticeable when printing in color--there would be slight gaps between color bands (you'd see a line of yellow, for example, in the middle of your photograph).
Before I got my 740 I had been using a DeskJet 722c on an IBM as my photo printer. The 722c made the user align the print heads every time a new cartridge was installed. This was done by matching one of several patterns printed out with an image on screen. The 740 never made me do that and I'm willing to bet that it got out of sync because of that.
The HP DeskJet 710/720 series was another printer that was extremely popular in the late 1990s. However, it had a few shortcomings of its own--it was parallel only and was Windows only (it did not work on MS-DOS and I could not get it to work this past year when I tried using it as a printer for WordPerfect 5.1). I actually think the 722c was a better printer overall than the 740 though; I remember the color balance being better on the 722c plus my 722c doesn't have a band problem despite being two years older.
Inkjets as a whole are, to me, the biggest pain in computing. I don't have any set up right now and only occasionally get my old Canon i450 out to print photos (usually I only do this at Christmas so I can get a few cards generated for the few people I know who don't use e-mail). The cost of ink and the rate at which these printers consume it made a laser printer the obvious choice for someone whose needs are mostly black and white text. I still have my old 722c and 740, yet both are just sitting around (they are my only parallel printers though so I keep them around for whenever I get my IBM out or if either the i450 or the LaserJet breaks).
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