Color Dot Matrix Printer from 1990

Greetings and welcome to an LGR printer thing! This is something I wanted to talk about for a long time now. This is a Star Micronics NX-2420 Rainbow dot matrix printer. This was announced in 1990. Fall of 1990, right before the COMDEX Show and it was retailing at a cost of $549 on launch or the equivalent of about $1,043 today, adjusted for inflation. Yikes. So yeah despite that price this was actually billed as one of their low-cost printers. Yeah, low cost right alongside the model NX-2420 Multifont which was 50 bucks cheaper at $499.

This was not one of the most expensive printers on the market really. I mean, laser printers were still twice as much as this thing but it still wasn’t cheap. I just noticed does that say Ponts?

Well despite the typos, this was actually meant for businesses. Mostly small businesses being that it wasn’t like the very highest and full letter quality things that you can get from a laser printer but it was still for dot matrix, it was pretty awesome. So you’ve got that 24 pin print head, 250 characters per minute printing speed. Five resident ponts or fonts built into the unit, switchable push-pull tractor and friction paper feeds and the headlining feature color printing by way of a 30K print buffer to support the Epson LQ color emulation with six vibrant colors or seven vibrant colors, I guess if you include black, magenta, cyan, violet, yellow, orange and green.

But yeah this is a color dot matrix printer as implied by the Rainbow designation. It’s certainly something I never saw back in the day but then this was targeted had small businesses like I said. Now this was not the first teller printer on the market or even the first color dot matrix printer not by a long shot now one of the well-known early examples is the Apple ImageWriter II from 1985 that was a nine-pin color dot matrix. Back in the day I had an Epson printer or our family did for our Packard Bell 486 that was a dot matrix printer that did monochrome and it was nine pins so you know this is a step up in multiple ways. This is just gonna be a treat to open up. It’s not exactly everything new old stock in here but it’s gonna be pretty darn close.

I got this a while back in the box and I’ve just been waiting to check it out and this is the day so let’s get to it. First up here we have one of the Nukote BM 256. This is one of the black ink ribbons. There’s one reason I picked this package up too is it had several different ribbons that it came with. Wow, November 8 1992, yeah that definitely looks used. I believe there’s a couple of new old stock ones in here as well as an all-important color ribbon which I hope works because those are proven very hard to find for this particular model these days. So we have a whole box of accessories here. Looks like the rear tray probably for the friction feed in the back of the printer. Let’s see what is this. Got an overlay it looks like just like a cheat sheet, quick reference overlay.

Let’s see what is this. Here we go. One of the stars of the show here when assuming it works, the X24CL Star Micronics color ribbon. Oooh, so this is just absolutely fascinating to me. So you’ve got all the different colors they’re going on.

I mean really just like yellow, red and blue of course there’s a black in there as well. I mean it doesn’t look entirely dry. I don’t know, we will see. Never know with these old dot-matrix ribbons. What the heck?

I didn’t know this was with it. T-shirt ribbon 8/31/91, what?

So it is color as well the same like yellow, red, blue but it looks darker for sure. Let’s see, custom T-shirts, heat transfer T-shirt ribbons. You probably spend a lot of money for that old computer so why not put it to work earning a few dollars.

Start a business selling custom T-shirts. What the crap. I had no idea this was in here, what?

So you can just print iron-on transfers to what paper?

Special heat transfer ribbon and it turns any kind of paper into like a T-shirt transfer, gotta try it out for sure. And then lastly here we have the manual for both the Multifont and the Rainbow. They were effectively the same printer like I said, except this one does color and also I had that extra bit of memory to be able to work with the color and all that kind of stuff emulate that Epson LQ thing going on. And now you know a couple other little improvements that were apparently worth 50 bucks. That’s all the accessories. I guess the printer, well no there’s still more crap. We’ve got another, yeah this is kind of like a new old stock black ink, just sort of a non-branded thing. That’s still in the plastic. Another black ink ribbon. Nice Sentronics printer or parallel cable right here, goes into the back of the printer, this goes into the parallel port of your PC.

Yet another black ink ribbon. Yet another black ink ribbon. It’s already kind of open but, now yeah. So if anything will be printing some black that’s for sure. It looks wonderful apparently. Signature Series don’t entirely know what that means. I’ve actually had an NX-2420 before. You may have seen it in some videos long ago. It was in way worse shape. It was yellow, this part was missing and it never quite worked 100%. Certainly wasn’t a Signature Series, of course it is just like a Decal. But anyway there’s the printer itself and I think that is a pretty smart looking unit. All these rounded edges, like this sticker is all still perfect and I don’t know, I kind of like the design of this and in a way I kind of don’t because I really like the older, chunkier, squared edges and sharp corners of like the Epson I had as a kid.

But you know even that was a little bit rounded thing. We’re getting more rounded in terms of printers in the 90s. So we’ve got a black ribbon already in place there but yeah look at that. This is a one big reason that I wanted this

because it seriously looks new. Even all the foam is still in place. It’s even in place on the bottom. So it really it does not look used. Different tractor feeding kind of things right here, I’ve got some computer paper were gonna use with this.

I don’t know why this is oddly exciting for just being an old dot-matrix. So here’s how you kind of use these cheat sheets, you just sort of overlay them on there and depending on what you want to do this will let you mess around with the electronic dip switches. So depending on the mode you are on this, turning dip switches this is kind of interesting too.

So you see this little cover right here?

That is the space for cartridges of various expansion so you can add more fonts, more RAM. That’s just one reason that I find out matrix printers so interesting is because output for different typefaces and all that you have to rely on them in here like you see draft modes and Times New Roman, Sans-serif Quarry or Prestige Script. Those are the different built in fonts and then depending on your software, you can of course do all sorts of other things, you know true type fonts and such and Windows 3.1 which were going to try. But all of these built-in options, they’re gonna be a different option depending on your needs and what kind of letter output you desire. So yeah let’s just go ahead and set it up and try it out. Yeah, so I’ve got the LGR Wood grain 486 turned on, ready to go, printer plugged into that.

Only we just need the printer turned on now. So that was the power-on self-test there. The printer head is in position but those few beeps meaning that it is not ready to print. There is no paper inserted. So we will get some paper. I have a couple different types we’re gonna be trying out here and I’ve just got first up some plain sheets of like single you know, its printer paper typical stuff and that goes in the top of the printer. But one of my favorite things about using these styles of computer printers is using yeah, some of this classic fan fold paper here so it’s all connected like this. And then you’ve got these tear-off kind of edges and everything. So you can just tear off a sheet when you’re done and then you have these little bits on the side. I don’t know there’s something amusing about this. So this is giving a continuous feed of paper and that’ll go into the tractor feed area in the back of the printer there.

First up though just regular paper. So we’ve got a couple ways we can load a paper into the top here. First we gotta have that clicked into place so there’s a bit of friction and well just be loading in one sheet at a time at least to start with.

So yeah that just sort of goes in between those two loose approximations of guides. And then once it’s in like that, there’s a couple ways that we can get it down into the printer. One is just manually feeding it with the platen knob here, kind of like a typewriter, or if we want to make sure it’s an offline mode then I’ll do that right there and that automatically feeds it right up to the top margin on the very top of the paper really. So yeah you can adjust that manually a little bit but let’s just have the printer do a very quick test though. So that’ll involve having it cycling through the power, holding this online button on power on and it will do a short testing print.

All right so we got a nice Times New Roman test print would be I think the ROM version number and then just running through different styles of how well really intensities of what it can output in terms of text and the normal draft mode.

Yes for the computer side of things and there are no drivers to setup and DOS, it’s just on LPT1 here. So for instance we could open the DOS Edit program and we can just type in anything you want to write here and till do it. And that was that. Just one line doesn’t take very much. So one of the interesting things about these printers is of course the fonts as I was mentioning. So if we switch this into offline mode that means that it’s not gonna be able to receive anything from the computer itself and were just gonna be dealing with the printer for the moment but that allows us to switch between different fonts or typefaces here. So we have a high-speed draft and then just draft Times New Roman, Sans Serif, Courier, Prestige and Script are our five different letter quality fonts.

Supposedly letter quality. So let’s just do script here for instance and were gonna print out the same thing. Whoops, let’s get it an online mode. And there we go. It printed out the same line in a Script Font. Oh put it offline we can switch it over to Sans Serif Font. There’s that, or we can put it in Prestige. So yeah that’s how you adjust fonts if you’re using a program like this that doesn’t have the ability to send out what you see is what you get situation over to the printer and it’s just sending like this is just basic text. And so that’s completely determined by the printer itself in this particular case. Something else you can have it do is if you just want to have it say print out something while you’re doing something else you can actually use the MS-DOS Print command which I mean that does a lot of things but let’s say if we have it print out autoexec.bat and then we can just do something else while that’s printing.

And there we go. So it was just printing while we were doing other things in the system. So it sends everything that it wants to print over into the printer buffer. And let’s just multitask how fancy, fancy DOS. Now this is another thing that I’ve always found quite amusing. Like say we have this that’s on the screen at the moment, if you just press Print Screen, the actual Print Screen key on the keyboard, it will print out the whole contents of the screen. 

So we literally just printed the screen there and that is the original function of the Print Screen key. So yeah not just for taking screenshots, I mean it is, but it’s a physical screenshot on paper. So that’s a thing I abused a little bit as a kid once I found that out I think by accident. I was like whoa what does this key do and then my printer starts doing crap and parents probably like what are you doing but that’s what that is.

But wait there’s more. If you actually hold down the Control key and press Print Screen, that enables the Print Screen Echo Mode. So now anytime you type in something, it’s going to type out the contents of that right there on the paper as you go through and do things on the computer. There you go. Till just keep on doing that as long as you have that Echo Mode enabled, unless the paper runs out. So let’s get to some Windows 3.1 stuff because I really want to. Now while DOS does not need any kind of drivers, you will need something for Windows 3.1. And while it comes with a ton of printer drivers it doesn’t come with one specifically for the NX-2420 which means are gonna be a bit limited in terms of features and setting things up and till only be a monochrome.

And you could choose one of the compatible printers like the Epson LQ-860 which is actually what the 2420 here emulates. It’s not going to be fully featured. So I actually was able to go onto the Star website and yes they are still around and they do keep all their old drivers and software for like all their printers pretty much on their website. 

So I downloaded those, put them on a disk and got to installing them here on Windows 3.1. And once that extracted everything it need to is able to go into the Windows Printer Setup and choose that as a new printer and got the drivers going and gave us a nice Control Panel for the 2420 specifically like Resolution and Feeder settings and Margins and the all-important Color Mode. Yes you can enable and disable color and amount of ink you’re using all that kind of stuff from within this Control Panel.

So you really do want a driver preferably for this the later versions of the 2420 would have come with driver disks but seeing as mine is an earlier release as far as I can tell, it didn’t. It doesn’t even mention Windows in the manual.

But now that it’s all set up. We can open something like Paintbrush and do one of my favorite things which is just paint away the brush. I don’t want to print this out actually. I don’t want to do that at all. But like for instance I’ve always liked this image here from Windows 3, The Chess Flying and we can just print that out though let’s see, well do a draft and the whole Window and that’s fine and it’s gonna send it over into the printer buffer. Well that took a bit of time but that particular feeling that it makes, I know there’s a fascinating texture there but yeah check it out we’ve got a nice monochrome image and yes monochrome because I was printing in just the default settings which it defaults to monochrome and I only have black ink ribbon installed right now.

But yeah check it out, I mean that wasn’t even the highest quality at all. Okay so we’ve seen how it prints on single sheets of paper in monochrome. But before we get to the color, let’s actually try it out on that tractor feed and I have not printed a banner in Print Shop Deluxe on that kind of paper and 2526 years been a long time. So I’m itching to try it again. Is obviously a bit more setup involved here as you might expect but the idea is that you do this once and leave it set up this way and you have a more convenient paper loading mechanism since there’s no like tray loader for multiple single sheets. That in position and this tilted down, no ideas were just gonna have these little tractor feeders in the right spot. You can slide these around to adjust to your paper size.

That side first and in there we go. The paper will come out a continuous feed until you tear it off wherever you need to. So all right let’s get it turned on, there we go, were ready to print some banners. So the Print Shop Deluxe is the only choice and application for this as far as I’m concerned. Lots of happy memories making banners that are way too long and for absolutely no reason except that it was kind of fun for whatever. So just look at these backdrops, brings back an instant mass of memories is where my family and friends we use pretty much like every single one of these for birthdays and events and church gatherings and who knows what else. For some reason these elephants are speaking to me, we are going to use these, oh yeah, we’ve got a single image, I guess this is a text box.

So we can just put in something here and the whole new classic effects. Will do something a little bit lighter because I’m not wanting to have this take absolutely forever well see if this is too long of a banner. I’m gonna fix it to three pages.

So there’s a few other things well need to switch around here for one thing we’re working with Greyscale and we don’t need cut sheet banner printing because were not cutting sheets. We’ve got this continuous tractor feed of all sorts of paper coming through. If we had individual sheets perhaps we might want to well we wouldn’t want that option but we don’t. Right here were under the Printer Setup as well make sure everything’s good, no color course, default margins

because we don’t want any spaces in between the pages. Looks pretty good.

All right so well start the process of transferring everything in terms of images and all that over to the printer and here we go. All right I don’t want to tear it too hard. There we go. You got a banner here. The draft in dithering settings made it look a little crappier than it could have and I’m not entirely sure what happened to the tops of these letters here that sort of got cut off of white. Here though it looks like it actually found a spot in the ink ribbon where I’m assuming this is probably the section of the ink that have just been sitting there so long it got dry and it looped back around.

There was no ink there anymore really but so it goes, man and I had forgotten the smell of printer head doing its thing. I mean that is really hot. It’s a particular smell that comes along with this. It’s not just the sound and like the feel of the paper and everything but there’s so many things going on with the senses when you print out stuff on old machinery like this.

Like everything has been all warm like the electronics and died just out of it. Well I printed a banner. That’s one of my biggest once, my biggest desires for this video fulfilled. So I’m gonna put it back to the single sheet paper mode and let’s try out some of that different ink that I have. all you need to do is just set it up like normal. It’s a much wider ribbon than the black ink is. I think all we need to do, again this is not in the manual so I’m kind of just guessing here, not here. Print Manager will go into the Printer Set up and set this to color. 

Well see if that does it because the only thing it mentions in the manual as far as doing color is using these switches, putting it into a different mode and then changing between the individual six colors that it can do and then just doing like a straight color for your text that you’re printing which is not exactly what I’m looking for here. All right let’s see, let’s just see, I don’t know. Let’s just try something. This little thing. Well it tried. Definitely no color there in terms of moving the whole ink ribbon cartridge up and down up against the actual print head.

Unfortunately this little guy is no longer pulling the ribbon back in. There’s bits of gunk coming out as I pull the ribbon the other way here and it does make this still move but it just started deteriorating inside of this thing and it’s like the roll is just gross now. I’ll see what I can do. Don’t know if it’s supposed to work like this but I was able to pop off this lid here and you can start to see where the problem is there. These very delicate foam wheels that kind of hold it in place and go up against these little pinch rollers there and they’re not doing their thing anymore. And it’s just they’ve deteriorated to the point or look at that, they’re all gone. They’re supposed to look more like this and now it just looks like that. It’s kind of neat to see how bunches up inside there though. It kind of reminds me of like a tape loop for doing like reverb echoey effects with audio.

But just out of curiosity, I did open one of the black ones as well. And you can see they used a completely different type of mechanism here. So it’s all plastic and gears and stuff. No foam whatsoever. It’s still a beautiful mess here in terms of actual ribbon being bunched up like that. That’s just really cool. And I can see it kind of turns around there at one point and anyway this is a well-used ribbon. So I don’t really care. But this whole this whole foam wheels situation is just not, I mean look at this one. This one’s even absolutely, it’s no good, absolutely no good. Man all hope is not lost before getting this the printing color though. After all remember we have that T-shirt ink ribbon which you know, it looked a little darker in terms of this right here. But it does at least turn when I move the knob.

Make sure there’s no special settings in term of the print head position. Well it does say use it to make it further away from the paper. So it was like a three, let’s move it like a, now five. Load it in there, of course so to the other one. Let’s try the same little image. So that’s a little better. That is indeed a color image. I mean not a particularly great one but there it is, nice top color dot matrix print. 

You’re granted being that it is using this T-shirt ink which look a little darker, maybe it’s actually just showing up a little darker but I mean let’s just go for it. Let’s just try out Chess. Now let’s see. I have some slightly higher weight paper here somewhere. Just a little bit thicker, well see if this works any better. Now were gonna put it out of its miseries because it really doesn’t appear to have enough ink to do this.

In fact it got that little bit done and it just kind of gave up. I see what the problem is. Its straight-up tore a hole in it. And this is barely turning anymore. So seems that these color cartridges suffer from the same problem. Wow, alright so my curiosity is killing me. I’ve got to see whether or not that transfer ink transfers anything. So I’m gonna get a white cotton blend T-shirt here and a blank sleeve, we’ll see. I don’t even know, let’s just do it. Cause I mean considering how old this ink was and it looked kind of dry and you know what, oh my goodness. Wow, well I’ll be that transferred about as well as you can hope, considering there’s a little spot there where it actually matches a slight creasing in the paper where the ink got a little right here. It just bunches up on a thinner paper like this. I should have used thicker paper in retrospect. But well yeah it went straight on to the sleeve.

In fact it kind of went through. Well I suppose that’s it for this journey with the Star NX-2420 Rainbow. Didn’t go exactly as Id planned and that color ink is a bit of a downer but I do have other plans for not only this printer but other do matrix printers that I have that can do color and maybe I’ll be able to track down an actual working color ink ribbon for this one. 

But you know whatever, at least I got to make a banner. Haven’t made one of these and absolutely forever. And I mean if anything, we got some cool image you printed out and got the one color image, a color dot matrix printer image. So uh, yeah. Good times.  about the Star NX-2420 lovely little machine. Here on LGR, there are new videos every single week not usually about printers but sometimes I get the urge. By the way subscribe if you like this type of thing and as always thank you very much for watching LGR!