Bangalore: "The report of my death is an exaggeration," American humourist Mark Twain wrote in gleeful understatement, after opening a newspaper while travelling in Europe only to find his own obituary prominently displayed.

The section of the computer printer industry that manufactures the impact or dot matrix printer (DMP) might be tempted to issue a similar statement — so often have observers pronounced "RIP" for the sturdy old machines which printed by hammering a rectangular matrix of dots on an inked ribbon, automating and only slightly modifying, the way manual typewriters worked for over a century.

India may yet turn out to be the last happy hunting ground for DMP makers — three of possibly only six or seven companies who still have impact printer plants working — TVSE, Wipro (WeP) and Lipi — are Indian. Two are Japanese: Epson and Panasonic; one, Tally (now Tally Genicom) which now concentrates on large format industrial printers, is based in the U.S.

The dot matrix printer which uses a grid of either 9 or 24 metal dots — depending on how sharply you want to print — is still the mainstay of the Point of Sale (PoS) industry — the printers that print the receipts at the checkout counters of shops and supermarkets. In India one of every three printers bought by the small and medium-sized businesses continues to be a DMP. TVSE, Epson and WeP (formerly Wipro e-Peripherals) are market leaders here, selling 1-2 lakh printers each every year and the growth has been healthy if not spectacular... enough to make the business still worthwhile in an era which has moved on to lasers and inkjets.

WeP and TVSE are constantly innovating to create faster, quieter, products for niche markets: WeP recently rolled out a high speed impact printer — the HQ 2100 — that prints 1,000 characters a second or over 700 pages an hour. The character size can be enlarged 16 times or reduced by a factor of 66 per cent at a touch of a button. The approximately Rs. 1 lakh machine, made in Mysore, meets the new European standard known as ROHS or Restriction of Hazardous Substances which means it does not contain mercury, cadmium or chromium — or other chemicals that are difficult to recycle. WeP therefore aims to carve out a good piece of the European market with this qualification.

At the other end of the user scale TVSE has launched the Pro VX 3810, a Rs. 7,500, 80-column 380 characters-per-second printer, part of the Proton range that the company totally redesigned for tough Indian conditions: Even the tear bar is stainless steel.

Both players have models across the price and performance spectrum and by keeping a canny year to the ground and listening to user gripes, they have managed to keep the DMP market alive and kicking: A few years ago TVS introduced the `in situ' re-inkable ribbon which addressed a major customer hassle: having to replace the ribbons too often.

How long will these dot matrix machines continue to make an `impact'? The motto for the time being, seems to be `never say die'.

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