Printer Ribbons

[supersurgilator]

Not to sound dated, but I work in my college library and we still use dot matrix printers as receipt printers. My question is what is the shelf life of NIB ribbons? Right now we are using generic ribbons that aren't any good. They aren't printing very dark, and the print tends to fade in and out especially when the ribbon is new, like it is drying out. I found a date on the package and they are from December of 2005. Last time they ordered, they bought the genuine ribbons and they were excellant, however nobody can find them in the storage room and they were only able to find one of the crappy ones again. Being disgusted with this, I ordered some myself online from ebay (they were also generic), got 6 for $12 which included shipping, and they are printing just as dark as the genuine ones that we paid $12 for just one ribbon of. SO basically I'm wondering if the first batch that we are still using up aren't printing dark because they are generic or because they are old. I haven't owned one of these printers myself since I was little, so I really don't remember much about buying ribbons.

 

[lordkenmore]

I think age might be more of a problem than generic. For years, I had a dot matrix printer, and I almost always used generic ribbons. The only trouble I ever had came the last years I used this printer. At that point, the generic ribbons I found were--in a word--terrible. One was so bad that the nearly worn out ribbon it was replacing was darker!

For a while, I had a good source of ribbons--a store that specialized in printer stuff. The owner told me that age was critical, and aimed to sell a ribbon within a certain number of months. Office Depot and the like, he said, could have ribbons rotting on a shelf for far longer--in some cases, years. The fresher, he said, the better.