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An old mentor gave us a course on these types of printers as well as others like drums, etc
He then went into details like you describe on how to “test” (not torture) the various types.
Thanks for bringing back those great memories.
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This reminds me... The company I worked for a long time ago was given the contract for managing the computer system for a local credit union. The system was an HP 9000 'supermini', and had several of the old 300MB 9-platter disk drives that were the size of washing machines. The first night that we ran the end of month processing for the credit union, which really hammered the data base, we discovered that the HP installer guy had neglected to bolt the drives in place on the raised computer floor. As a result, the drives took a walk, pulled their cables, and everything came to a resounding, crashing, halt.
As I recall, we had a team from HP out replacing hardware and rebuilding the machine for several 24-hour days, during which transactions were recorded on paper.
Software Zen: delete this;
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I use a laser. Not a laser printer, an industrial cutting laser I got for another project, at the lowest setting and highest speed (6w 300mm/s) it is just enough to scorch the paper. Zero ink needed! Though it's brown, not black, and is best read with a backlit table (like an xray), not to mention significantly more fragile so avoid designs including things like large boxes. Or just glue or laminate it to a piece of black card stock for contrast and strength.
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Memtha wrote: Though it's brown, not black
Computer history:
In the days when "Office Automation" was a new concept, lots of secretaries had never seen a terminal or a computer - and certainly not in underdeveloped countries. I was teaching our new office automation system to a group of secretaries at UN FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization); several of them from third world countries. When I told them where to find the switch to turn on the terminal, "just like how you turn on an electric typewriter", they gave me a strange look: Electric typewriter?? They had never seen such a thing!
After a week long course, we spent the last half hour on reactions to the Office Automation system, with automatic pagination, automatic justification, easy editing of mistyping, adding, moving or removing text, automatic chapter numbering ... The very first reaction that came up, and the only one that all the course participants agreed upon, was: "The ribbon in the printer is so black. Cold, harsh, unfriendly! We don't want to send out letters having that hard look! Couldn't we get a ribbon with a more brownish, rather than bluish, black?"
Seen from the view of the software developer (I had just become responsible for one of the components), it was like a blow in the face: All this fancy functionality we had developed, ant they were not impressed? Well, maybe they were, but the very most important thing to them was the tone of the printer ribbon!
It did teach me a lesson about listening to customers, their priorities may be quite different from yours, if you are a software developer. I was happy to see that after returning to my office, we made a request to Philips (they made printers back then!) for brownish-black ribbons, and they reported back that they acknowledged it as an important issue, and would investigate the possibility of making ribbons with an alternate, more brownish black tone.
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And to this day, black letters still use magenta ink to be brownish.
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Nelek wrote: Why can't they just allow the "only use black ink" as standard option?
That's probably a problem in the driver, not the printer. It could also be something in the color management (ICC profiles and such) that defines shades of gray as specific CMYK values rather than just a %K. There are also cases where you can only achieve certain gray levels using CMYK. This is determined by drop size, the number of drops per pixel, and how intensity of a particular pixel is created.
Black inks especially tend to be optimized for performance when printing pure black text. They're not so good at gray scales.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Gary R. Wheeler wrote: Black inks especially tend to be optimized for performance when printing pure black text. They're not so good at gray scales.
I would not choose grey scales, if I had black as option
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Nelek wrote: Why can't they just allow the "only use black ink" as standard option?
As a guess because the company is in the business of making money rather than printers.
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I love this language except when it's used cryptically. You can produce more incomprehensible code with C++ than I think you can in any other major language.
I'm poring over C code right now - C really isn't that much better, but fortunately you can do less with it. The code is evil. It's absolutely terrible to read, almost as if they were *trying* to hide intent.
Porting it to C++ is my fresh hell.
I love this language, but would it kill people to write readable code, or at least comment it with something *helpful*?
Anyway, I guess what I'm saying is C++ is both my favorite and least favorite language. It's weird like that.
Real programmers use butterflies
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You would love Perl, methinks. There is no such thing as unreadable code written in that language.
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Fair. I forgot about perl. Mercifully.
Real programmers use butterflies
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Agreed! 
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honey the codewitch wrote: You can produce more incomprehensible code with C++ than I think you can in any other major language
Hahahahaha ... not even close.
Work this out:
⎕←(~A∊A∘.×A)/A←1↓⍳N
or this:
life ← {⊃1 ⍵ ∨.∧ 3 4 = +/ +⌿ ¯1 0 1 ∘.⊖ ¯1 0 1 ⌽¨ ⊂⍵}
C++ can't even come close to APL for code density or incomprehensibility! 
The first one is the Sieve of Eratosthenes, the second is the Game of Life.
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Does anyone actually use APL anymore though? I mean significantly, not just people porting old code and the like? According to Wiki the last stable release was 21 years ago.
Real programmers use butterflies
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Surprisingly, yes: Today, APL remains in use in a wide range of commercial and scientific applications, for example investment management,[82] asset management,[91] health care,[92] and DNA profiling,[93][94] and by hobbyists.[95]
I suspect APL programmers will tell you the last stable release was perfect, so it hasn't needed changing since ... they are generally an odd bunch, APL programmers ... 
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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OriginalGriff wrote: Today, APL remains in use in a wide range of commercial and scientific applications, for example investment management,[82] asset management,[91] health care,[92] and DNA profiling,[93][94] and by hobbyists.[95]
So that's 4x no one can understand the ![Elephant | [mastadon]](https://codeproject.global.ssl.fastly.net/script/Forums/Images/elephant.gif) ing stuff well enough to port ancient legacy code, and 1x ![Sunshine | [little ray of sunshine]](https://codeproject.global.ssl.fastly.net/script/Forums/Images/sunshine.gif) s playing code golf. 
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
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TECO was the same way. TECO was used to write the first version of Emacs and is a string processing language. One of the challenges TECO coders would do is write a one liner and challenge their counterparts to write the result of putting their name in the function.
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I remember TECO - had a port of it as my first desktop computer editor!
Took some learning, but boy was it powerful when all you had was a line editor...
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APL was my first language; in high school, then in university co-op work.
Yes, it's dense, and uses symbols you don't see on a regular kbd.
But it really changes how you think, for the good.
Functional programming (!)
Expressions on data collections, rather than rat-holing on iterators.
It was great for analytics of the first (StatsCan) time-series database.
After APL, I worked in C, ZOPL, PL/I, Algol, POP2, VB, perl, C++ and more
Every one added new bits for understanding the next one down the line;
some of them on what to avoid (I'm looking at you, C++20).
But APL was the strongest and cleanest.
Now JPMorgan uses it (well K),
because it is superfast for solving complex problems, and surprisingly straightforward.
Everyone has fun with the primes and GameOfLife oneliners  )
They don't get to see the full applications. Sigh.
My2¢
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mischasan wrote: because it is superfast for solving complex problems, and surprisingly straightforward.
Right up until someone asks for the studies that demonstrates those statements using something besides benchmarks (that are often coded well in one language and then so poorly done in other languages that one suspects that they were written that way deliberately.)
But to be fair I am certain I have seen that claim about every language and based, when based on anything at all, on the same sort of lopsided benchmarks.
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"Superfast for solving problems" -- superfast for the solver to formulate. Sorry if that it sounds like, "superfast execution time".
Building systems in APL for Rank Xerox, I sometimes completed and ran a solution in the course of a short conversation; so we could get on with the conclusion from its result. Occasionally (rarely) was its speed of execution an issue.
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If you've got a system that supports dc, try this:
dc -e '2p3p[dl!d2+s!%0=@l!l^!<#]s#[s/0ds^]s@[p]s&[ddvs^3s!l#x0<&2+l.x]ds.x'
Software rusts. Simon Stephenson, ca 1994. So does this signature. me, 2012
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