
Computer interfacing
Other drawbacks of the daisy-wheel printer are that they
are incredibly noisy and extremely slow. Why they are
slow is not hard to imagine. Whenever a new character
is to be struck, the daisy-wheel has to be spun round to
the correct angular position. Even when the shortest path
is chosen, this takes valuable time. The complete print
head assembly also has to be moved along to the next
character position. The hammering of the wheel at a rate
of, say, 20 characters per second is responsible for most
of the noise, the level for which has been quoted at 75 dB,
about twice the acoustic power output of a dot-matrix
printer. ...