local dealer or repair shop if you need the machine for your work.
You may, of course, have to pay for an inspection.
BACKUP II ❑ A Few Grouchy Words on Printers
I sold my =daisy wheel=—a printer that prints like a high-priced
electric typewriter—and replaced it with a plebeian =dot matrix
machine=.
Why? Because all printers, especially my 1975-vintage daisy, are a
series of lousy trade-offs.
And one of the trade-offs was about to be my solvency.
The old daisy wheel cost a mere $650 used—quite a bargain for a machine
whose latest models go for several thousand dollars—and Anderson
Jacobson didn’t charge for minor adjustments if I lugged in the bulky
printer myself. AJ, however, kept after me to get a $450-a-year service
contract.
Then, one day, a printed circuit board conked out, and the replacement
board and some other work came to $300.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” I told the crew at Anderson Jacobson. “Three
hundred dollars for a printer that cost me $675 originally?”
No, Anderson Jacobson wasn’t out to gyp me. Quite honestly, the people
there had intended to make their money off me through the service
contract; and that would have been fine for a company that needed a
heavy-duty, industrial-quality printer to pound away, day after day,
around the clock, without stopping. But for a lone free-lance writer?
However fast I typed, I could never give them the amount of business for
which its makers had designed it.
So like destitute parents searching for the right foster home for their
children, I looked for better, more affluent surroundings for my
printer.
I asked for, and got, $650 for the printer with a =tractor feed= thrown
in for free—it lets you use big stacks of perforated computer paper
without stuffing in new sheets when you reach the end of the page. The
new owner, a Washington consultant, _understood_. He wasn’t just buying
a printer; he was buying his right to an Anderson Jacobson service
contract.
My AJ’s successor was the Microprism Model 480, a sleek, plastic-covered
machine that took up less space on my tabletop than some typewriters.
In a dot-matrix printer like the 480, little pins hit the ribbon, making
impressions on the paper. An “A” is one series of pins, a “B” another,
and so on. The quality normally isn’t any match for the daisy wheel’s,
even though the price may be much lower than a daisy going the same
speed. “Prints like a daisy, costs like a matrix!” Integral Data Systems
touted the Model 480. That was stretching matters.
The letters from my next printer, a Panasonic KX-P1092, could _almost_
pass for a typewriter’s. It sold discounted at a local store for $489,
just a few dollars more than Anderson Jacobson wanted for its one-year
maintenance contract.
Here’s what else I could have chosen—rightly or not: