Daisywheel printer
The daisywheel printer is a type of printer for Ordinateur which produces a striking of high-quality. In the years 1980 one often indicated it like a printer of mail quality (with the difference of the dot-matrix printers of high-quality (NLQ), which did nothing but approach mail quality). There also existed, and there always exists, of the typewriters with daisy, founded on the same principle.
The system used a small wheel (called daisy ) on which each letter was printed in relief on metal or plastic. The printer made turn the wheel to place the letter necessary in front of a pawl which struck it its reverse and applied it to paper. Many regards the machine with daisy resembles a typewriter standard in the way of forming its letters on the page, and remotely only by the details of the mechanism (a daisy instead of the bars of characters or ball used on the typewriters Selectric from IBM).
In the case of the typewriters with daisy and of the Selectric machines using a ball, one could use various police forces by changing daisy or of ball. An adapted software was to stop the printer with each time the change had to be operated, placing the cursor in the center of the carriage and requiring of the user to change the daisy before continuing. Xerox Diablo D25 included such a possibility in the material of the printer. Although effective in the majority of the circumstances, a document alternating several police forces (mainly the simple text and the italic) quickly became a tiresome task.
It was possible to mark the bold characters, although it was especially on the last daisywheel printers top-of-the-range. When one asked them to print in fat, some printers doubled or tripled the striking of a given nature and some printers with control (Servocommande) very slightly advanced the carriage to obtain a broader character (and thus blacker). As for the others (i.e. daisywheel printers cheap), they carried out a return of the carriage (without passing to the following line) to return at the beginning of the line, passed by again above the normal text and struck again each character in fat - the inevitable inaccuracy when it was a question of striking again exactly at the same place after the carriage-return led to the same result as a printer with control much more expensive, with this only consequence that when the printer took age, the text in fat became even fattier.
The daisywheel printers were rather widespread during the years 1980, but never were it as much as the dot-matrix printer because of their higher cost and the possibility that offered the dot-matrix printers to print drawings and to use pig iron and cast iron different. The majority of the printers at points were also much faster than the rival daisywheel printers, since each character required that the wheel turn until a new position.
As with all the other printers with striking, the daisywheel printers are noisy. With the difference in the humming of a matrix printer, a daisywheel printer launched at high speed evoked the noise of a gust of machine-gun.
The introduction of the laser printers of high-quality and the ink jet printers of ink at the end of the years 1980 quickly made disappear the systems with daisy, except for the small residual market of the typewriters.
Impassioned still use some daisywheel printers which remain for texts which need only one line (in opposition to those which require a page) like the writing of data of log, whereas others use them for the impression of labels of high-quality. In both cases they are tasks for which a laser writer or for jet of ink is not appropriate well. The laser printers print by page (and not by line), which means that they cannot print a line of text without ejecting all the page. Like the matrix printers, the printers laser and with jet of ink are also extremely likely to be damaged when they print labels.
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