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EDN Europe's Editor Graham Prophet posts a selection of comments and insights prompted by the many items of industry news and rumour that cross the editorial desk or are gathered on his frequent travels to interviews, press conferences and events around Europe - and further afield - and somehow never find their way to the magazine or the web site, recovering some of the information otherwise lost in the noise level...

Monday, June 02, 2008

Still buzzing after all these years

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Travelling through several airports last week, it occurred to me that the airline industry must be the last refuge of the dot-matrix printer. Look behind the desk at any number of departure gates and what do you see? Long after the rest of the world has migrated to laser or ink-jet technology, there they are; venerable Oki Microlines, and ancient NEC Spinwriters, still hammering away, day after day. Aside from the (evident) reliability, you can see the attraction. The airlines print metre after metre of passenger manifests and the like, departure after departure – the quality doesn’t matter, only the airline staff have to read it – and it probably all gets thrown away almost immediately. Is this still the lowest-consumable-cost, small-volume print technology? The cheapest of fan-fold, sprocket-fed paper (where else do you see that these days?) and an impact inking ribbon that you can use to the point of invisibility – I doubt if you can get any lower-cost than that.

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