[2][3] The term was coined in the 1980s to distinguish NLQ printing from true letter-quality printing, as produced by a printer based on traditional typewriter technology such as a daisy wheel, or by a laser printer.
as "just a neat little bit of hype",[2] but acknowledged that they "really show their stuff in the area of fonts, print enhancements and graphics".
What The New York Times called "dot-matrix impact printing",[2] was deemed almost good enough to be used in a business letter[5] Reviews in the later 1980s ranged from "good but not great"[6] to "endowed with a simulated typewriter-like quality".
By using multiple passes of the carriage, and higher dot density, the printer could increase the effective resolution.
To cut hardware costs, some manufacturers merely used a double strike (doubly printing each line) to increase the printed text's boldness, resulting in bolder but still jagged text.