[jazzy beats]
- [LGR] Greetings, and welcome to
another LGR dot matrix printer thing.
And today, I've got not one, but two of these
Star Micronics NX2400 compatible color ink ribbons
to go with my 2420 Rainbow
that I covered here in LGR a little while back.
And, well, if you saw that video, then you saw this happen.
The color ink ribbons that I had
that came with the printer just completely
fell apart on me pretty quickly.
And that was due to just the internal design of them
and the age and everything.
And the foam rollers that were in there,
I guess it was like six or eight rollers, I don't know,
they fell apart completely, ruined half of the ribbons,
and it was just such a mess afterward
that I just kind of gave up and didn't get
very much color stuff printed in the video like I'd hoped.
You know, the black ribbons were working perfectly fine,
but those have a much more robust mechanism, it turned out,
gears and some springs and some other things going on.
It was much more robust and it worked out
just great for that video.
But the color, well, that was a sad state of affairs.
However, a bunch of you got in touch after that video,
not only to give your suggestions
for trying to repair the ribbon,
which, sorry, is just not viable,
but also with a bunch of handy tips
for possible places to buy some new ones,
or at least new old stock or refurbished.
And I've tried six different vendors for these things
and only one has worked out
and that was this one right here.
And this was kind of a strange listing on Amazon
because, well, I mean, it didn't list the 2420 exactly
and it was a new code version,
it wasn't the original Star version,
and then it was also just not the right picture.
And you never know with those kind of listings,
but I took a chance, didn't hear anything for weeks,
so I tried another listing,
and the seller got right back to me and said,
we don't have this anymore, we're gonna cancel your order.
That was the most common response
that I've gotten from all of the different
like half-dozen attempts at buying these ribbons.
There's tons of those printer warehouse websites
and places that say they sell refurbished ribbons,
but they pretty much all have just outdated listings
and they've been out of stock forever
and just never bothered to update their websites.
But anyway, this came through, and like I said,
it took a couple weeks, but the seller was, I guess,
kind of shocked that somebody had ordered these
and totally didn't notice for a couple of weeks
and they were like, oh crap, sorry about that,
let me send you a second one just as an apology.
And so here we go, I've got two new old stock
Star Micronics 2420 color ink ribbons by Nu-kote.
Apparently they were on sale for 50 cents,
or on clearance, anyway, at some point.
So yeah, who knows what condition they're actually in,
although internally, or externally, they seem to be okay.
It's internally that I'm really concerned about.
But let's just go ahead and get it opened up
and see how it goes.
Oh, it's very easy to open packaging, how refreshing.
So yeah, look at this thing, this looks nice.
And look at those vibrant colors, oh my goodness,
those are insanely colorful, which is a good sign, at least.
So yeah, at least that moves.
So yeah, it was this whole deal
that was not working on the other ribbons.
Well, that and the fact that the color ink had
gotten gross and everything because of all the junk inside
and it was just kinda getting dry.
But they were 30-some years old,
I mean, who knows how old these are.
Just see if I can peek inside, though.
I'm not gonna take the whole thing apart.
Okay, ooo, you can kinda see there,
those foam rollers are still on this model.
I was hoping that maybe Nu-kote went with
the more robust rollers like the black ink ribbons.
But I guess not.
Well, I'll just install it and see what happens.
So this part's fairly easy.
You just kinda lift this guy out of here
and plop the color one in place.
I guess there's like an indentation on the bottom
that lets the printer know which is installed.
Everything else is controlled through software.
All right, let's get just a single sheet of paper
in here for now.
And we'll just open up a nice little 256 color bitmap,
since it's a little image.
I tried to print it out in the last video
and that didn't work. [laughing]
So let's make sure we're on, yeah, set to color.
[printer buzzing and beeping]
Oh, that's promising so far.
Check this out!
That, my friends, is a wonderful-looking
color dot matrix image.
All right, let's flip this over and see if we can do
the chess bitmap that I really wanted to do.
That would be this right here, lovely image.
And I'm gonna switch the quality option over to proof
and let's do it.
[printer buzzing and beeping]
[upbeat electronic music]
That genuinely looks amazing. [laughing]
Check it out side by side
with the same image on the monitor.
You can tell that it made some fascinating choices,
but honestly, I really like this aesthetic,
in terms of, like, going with much more of a magenta,
almost pink here instead of, well,
I guess this is more magenta,
this is a much more like neon pink.
And this blue is just darker all around.
The yellow is more intense.
It's, what a fascinating look.
Oh man, this is exciting, now that it's finally working.
So let's just keep going.
Here's something that I wanted to try in the last episode,
but, well, didn't because I couldn't
get things working properly.
In Sim City Classic, as well as other versions later on,
you could actually print out your cities here,
just like the map itself, and that results in a PCX file
that we can, where am I trying to go, here we go,
open in Paintbrush or whatever, and look at that.
[laughing]
Oh, this brings back some insane memories.
[printer buzzing and beeping]
[upbeat electronic music]
And there we go. [laughing]
It looks, it looks so cool.
Oh man, my dot matrix that I was
printing out these kind of maps on back in the day
was just monochrome, and I don't even think it was 24 pin.
So yeah, this is definitely an improvement
over what I was dealing with back then.
You could, of course, print out the full size, kind of,
like a screenshot of the entire city close up as well,
but that took up a ton more ink and paper.
But just look at this, look at this.
Isn't that amazing?
Oh man, it's amazing to me.
I like this way too much. [laughing]
Okay, let's hook up the tractor feed
and print ourselves a color banner.
I'm not gonna show the whole setup process
because I did that in the last video,
but suffice to say, it is an event.
Okay.
Here we go.
And we'll go to good old Print Shop Deluxe.
Stop, banner time.
We're gonna go with a horizontal banner
and we're gonna do a stretch dog, no man,
hotdog, yeah, that's a nice, colorful one.
We've got red, yellow, green,
and we can put things in the middle.
We'll just do, eh, do we wanna go for a full three pages?
I mean, I'm feeling lucky.
Let's see how that looks.
[laughing]
Ridiculous, let's do it.
Go into preferences, make sure everything's good.
Yeah, we don't want to do cut sheet
because we're not cutting any sheets,
we have a continuous feed.
All right, let's just print it out.
[upbeat electronic music]
Oh, dude.
Oh, this looks so good.
So, 40 minutes later, we have ourselves
a full-color dot matrix color banner.
Oh man, this looks, honestly, pretty friggin great.
The dithering is obvious up close,
but I really, I like that aesthetic a whole lot.
And it seems the more that it printed,
the better it got in terms of the streakiness.
I mean, there's still little bits of it,
but look at that, look at this big old greetings hotdog.
[laughing]
And now to tear off all of the edges.
[paper rustling and tearing]
Oh yeah, that is a far cry from
what we used to do back in the day.
Just printing it out as like monochrome
or like a coloring book mode in Print Shop
and then take a marker and just, you know,
coloring it in after the fact.
But no, look at this, it's got the color on it.
It honestly is way more vibrant than I thought it would be.
This is the coolest.
I'm gonna hang that up somewhere.
One more thing that I wanna do, though,
is see if we can get a T-shirt transfer done.
Now, of course, this is not T-shirt transfer ink,
like I had in the previous video.
And then had it crap out on me.
But if I get actual, like, T-shirt transfer paper,
instead of the ink, and then just print this onto that,
we'll see if that works.
And one reason I wanna do it is,
this is all that's left after one wash.
So I'm gonna print out like a full-color thing here
and then put that on actual modern transfer paper
and then put it on here and see what we can get.
But that'll have to wait for tomorrow.
Well, not for you but for me, because it's friggin late
and I don't have any T-shirt transfer paper here.
See you in the morning.
[lights clicking]
[rooster crowing]
[upbeat, playful music]
[coffee rattling and grinding]
[water splashing]
[glass rattling]
Yeah.
[upbeat, playful music]
So, once again, I do not have transfer ink this time.
We're just gonna use your typical transfer paper like this.
And this should be interesting.
Back to Print Shop Deluxe.
And just gonna do a sign here.
We'll do a classic coastal scene
because I don't think I did that last time.
And we can't do the scene without Cool Crab™
Giant Cool Crab, just hanging out
on the edge of the beach here.
I'll give him some appropriately 'cool' text.
I want this on a T-shirt. [laughing]
Okay, I'll make sure we're all good here.
And here we go.
[printer prints printingly]
[upbeat, jazzy music]
[printer buzzing, beeping in error]
Ah, what happened?
Ooh, you know, I was wondering about that.
The coating got stuck against the print head.
I guess a little bit thicker paper,
we'll need to change some settings.
[vacuum whirring]
Well, the good news is,
it doesn't seem to have torn the ribbon yet.
Gonna have to remove the print head.
Ooo, yeah, that got nasty, oh no.
So there's quite a buildup of the transfer paper material,
along with the ink.
It just, yeah, it was too close to the platon.
So I'm gonna clean that off.
Honestly, this needed to be cleaned anyway
because I don't know if you saw on those other prints,
but we're getting these little excess ink bits
where the head was going up and just
going back and forth on these things, so yeah.
It needed some cleaning.
It's a good idea to do that anyway.
Paper and ink residue and crap just
gets in these printers all the time.
[printer buzzing]
Got a self test going.
Looks like it's good now.
Okay, I'll try this one more time.
[printer buzzing and beeping]
[upbeat, jazzy music]
Yeah, same problem.
So that would be one reason you would have
dot matrix transfer ink, instead of using transfer paper.
The ink head and really all of this is just
too close to the paper itself.
I mean, this is made for like inkjets
and laser and all that.
So it's totally a different kind of process, and yeah,
it just gets to a certain point and just freaks out.
So, you know.
However, though, I had an idea.
What about just the crab?
It does a little bit without going crazy.
[printer buzzing]
[upbeat, jazzy music]
Yeah, there we go.
So not the full-page T-shirt transfer that I was hoping for,
but I was able to get it to work on this paper
for long enough to get one little two-inch cool crab.
[laughing]
We'll just get him vaguely cut out here.
[upbeat, jazzy music]
So I forgot to flip him around horizontally in Print Shop,
but that's okay.
So we'll just, gonna put him right here
above the very faded previous transfer and see how it goes.
[upbeat, jazzy music]
Oh no, looks like dirt on the bottom of my iron.
Oh well.
All right, let's see what we have done.
Give it a second to cool off.
[upbeat, jazzy music]
[laughing]
Oh, it looks so cool.
Crab. [laughing]
Oh, look at that, ignoring my obvious screw-ups
with the dirty iron and the previous crappy transfer,
I think that looks fantastic.
That right there, that is a color dot matrix
T-shirt transfer on modern transfer paper.
Obviously not a very viable solution,
considering it just slides around if it prints too much,
and yeah, but anyway, that is just awesome, regardless.
Okay, well, despite the somewhat unexpected hiccups,
but yet still expected because dot matrix,
I consider this an absolute win.
I mean, just look at this banner.
Is that not the best greetings hotdog
you've ever seen in your whole life?
Yeah.
Just the fact that we were able to source
some new old stock color ink ribbons for this thing,
ah, that just makes me happy.
So thank you so much to everyone who sent in
the hints and tips and just general, I don't know,
feedback on the last video about this thing.
It's thanks to your help that we were finally able to find
one ink ribbon source.
And there's still another one ready to be used at some point
so hopefully that one's in good condition.
Man, I'm really glad that those rollers inside
are much better off than the ones we had before.
So anyway, I hope that you enjoyed
taking a look at this lovely printer doing its thing
about as good as you can hope for,
being 30 years after its heyday.
I hope you stick around.
I've got a bunch more things coming
and lots more that I've done in the past.
Regardless, though, thank you very much
for watching what you just did on LGR.