keenerb
Veteran Member
I've been interested in getting my vintage PCs connected for printing.
I've ruined(?) an HP Laserjet IIID with an ebay cartridge that was a solid brick of toner and seems to have damaged some of the feed gears.
I've had two Laserjet 1100 printers begin feeding multiple sheets at once or reporting paper jam halfway through a job, and one developed dramatic quality issue that a fresh toner cartridge hasn't resolved
Inkjets (HP 610c, 940, 926, among others) clog up far too frequently when unused for any real period of time.
Printer ribbons for my dot matrix printers (Tandy DMP 105/133/130, Epson Actionprinter 3000) are hard to find and very dried out/faint and require a lot of messy reinking, and never really seem to give good quality afterwards anyway thanks to lots of streaking and muddled characters.
I ultimately decided that what I really wanted was a basic Epson ESC/P printer and a decent inkjet that I could use on my LPT equipped vintage pcs.
I was surprised to find that Epson still manufactures new ESC/P and ESC/P2 printers with some nice, modern features. Found the LX-350 (9-pin) for sale for a little over $200 with two year warranty and picked one up, and have been very pleased with it so far. Seems compatible with the LX-800 in all the applications I've tried, and is nice and fast and really decently quiet. It's nice to have a PHYSICAL dot matrix with tractor feed. It also supports USB alongside parallel port, and has Windows 11 drivers so I can even print from a modern machine to it or share it out across the network. The features that I quite like about it is the auto paper feed for single sheets and some nice quality-of-life features for fan fold paper like advance to tear-off position and then automatically returning to top of page. I'm going to stock up on some printer ribbons, vacuum seal them, and hope they don't dry out over the NEXT 30 years (assuming I make it that long).
For the inkjet issue I stumbled across the Retroprinter, www.retroprinter.com, which claimed to be a hat and software package to turn a Raspberry Pi into an HP, Epson, IBM compatible virtual printer (among other printer types). I picked one up and configured it for HP and after a small amount of troubleshooting it started dumping perfect deskjet prints into a shared folder as PDFs, which I simply open up and print on my Epson ecotank printer and it looks great. Theoretically I can set this up so prints dump directly to my modern Epson inkjet without the PDF intermediate step but the pdf seems to be ideal to me. It actually does a darn good job of Epson 9 and 24-pin emulation as well, but it lacks that certain impact printer charm, plus how am I supposed to print form feed banners on a MODERN inkjet? Blasphemy!
I've ruined(?) an HP Laserjet IIID with an ebay cartridge that was a solid brick of toner and seems to have damaged some of the feed gears.
I've had two Laserjet 1100 printers begin feeding multiple sheets at once or reporting paper jam halfway through a job, and one developed dramatic quality issue that a fresh toner cartridge hasn't resolved
Inkjets (HP 610c, 940, 926, among others) clog up far too frequently when unused for any real period of time.
Printer ribbons for my dot matrix printers (Tandy DMP 105/133/130, Epson Actionprinter 3000) are hard to find and very dried out/faint and require a lot of messy reinking, and never really seem to give good quality afterwards anyway thanks to lots of streaking and muddled characters.
I ultimately decided that what I really wanted was a basic Epson ESC/P printer and a decent inkjet that I could use on my LPT equipped vintage pcs.
I was surprised to find that Epson still manufactures new ESC/P and ESC/P2 printers with some nice, modern features. Found the LX-350 (9-pin) for sale for a little over $200 with two year warranty and picked one up, and have been very pleased with it so far. Seems compatible with the LX-800 in all the applications I've tried, and is nice and fast and really decently quiet. It's nice to have a PHYSICAL dot matrix with tractor feed. It also supports USB alongside parallel port, and has Windows 11 drivers so I can even print from a modern machine to it or share it out across the network. The features that I quite like about it is the auto paper feed for single sheets and some nice quality-of-life features for fan fold paper like advance to tear-off position and then automatically returning to top of page. I'm going to stock up on some printer ribbons, vacuum seal them, and hope they don't dry out over the NEXT 30 years (assuming I make it that long).
For the inkjet issue I stumbled across the Retroprinter, www.retroprinter.com, which claimed to be a hat and software package to turn a Raspberry Pi into an HP, Epson, IBM compatible virtual printer (among other printer types). I picked one up and configured it for HP and after a small amount of troubleshooting it started dumping perfect deskjet prints into a shared folder as PDFs, which I simply open up and print on my Epson ecotank printer and it looks great. Theoretically I can set this up so prints dump directly to my modern Epson inkjet without the PDF intermediate step but the pdf seems to be ideal to me. It actually does a darn good job of Epson 9 and 24-pin emulation as well, but it lacks that certain impact printer charm, plus how am I supposed to print form feed banners on a MODERN inkjet? Blasphemy!