Some of our customers don't realize that using lower quality ribbons is actually detrimental to the performance of their equipment. The reason is that when the print head passes over the ribbons, and the pins fire to create the characters, two things are happening. First, since the density of the cheaper quality ribbons is signifigantly lower, the chances of the print head pins getting snagged in the ribbon and breaking is high. Second, as the characters are formed, there is some element of the cheaper ribbons which comes away from the ribbon, causing a lint build up which can clog sensors, and jam moving parts. What they save per ribbon, they will eventually have to pay anyways on a service call to repair printer trouble!