P RINTERS Introduction What is a printer Printer

P RINTERS

Introduction What is a printer ? Printer classification Printer I/O interface Printer languages Printer qualities Commonly used printers and their technologies Special types of printers Summary

What is a Printer? In computing, a printer is a peripheral which produces a hard copy of documents stored in electronic form.

Printer classification Two primary technologies used for printing Printers Impact Printers Dot-matrix printers, Daisy wheel printers etc. Non-impact Printers Laser printers, Bubblejet printers etc.

Printer I/O Interfaces The most common I/O interface for printers has been the parallel interface with a 36 - pin plug. New printers and computers are using serial interface, especially Universal Serial Bus or Fire Wire.

Printer Languages Printer languages are commands from the computer to the printer to tell the printer how to format the document being printed. These commands manage font size, graphics, compression of data sent to the printer, color, etc.

Printer Qualities Colour Resolution Speed Memory

commonly used printers and their technologies Dotmatrix printer Laser printer Daisy wheel printer Thermal printer Ink jet printer Bubble jet printer

Dot matrix printer Extremely useful when the actual printed content is much more important than the quality of the print. Commonly used for printing invoices, purchase orders, shipping forms, labels, and other multi-part forms. Can print through multi-part forms in a single pass, allowing them to produce more pages than even high -speed laser printers.

Dot matrix printer Use a set of closely spaced pins and a ribbon to print letters or other characters on a page. These printers actually impact the page to print a character, much like a typewriter. Dot-matrix printers vary in terms of speed and the number of pins (9 -24) they have. They can run at a speed anywhere between 50 and 500 CPS (Characters Per Second).

Daisy wheel printer Able to produce letter- high quality text (unlike dot matrix printers, which created fuzzy, low-quality characters). These printers were slow, couldn't print graphics, and often incredibly loud.

Daisy wheel printer Simply a metal or plastic disk sliced into thin strips toward the center. A raised letter or character resided at the outer end of each strip. To print, the printer would spin the wheel to the correct character, and a hammer would strike it, forcing the character through an inked ribbon and onto the paper.

Inkjet printer Maintaining excellent quality at an affordable price. Capable of producing high quality print which almost matches the quality of a laser printer. Almost all ink-jets offer a color option as standard, in varying degrees of resolution etc.

Inkjet printer Ink-jets printers spray ionized tiny drops of ink onto a page to create an image. This is achieved by using magnetized plates which direct the ink's path onto the paper in the desired pattern. A standard ink-jet printer has a resolution of 300 dots per inch.

Inkjet printer

Bubble jet printer The principal difference between bubble-jet printers and ink-jet printers is that bubble-jet printers use - special heating elements to prepare ink, ink-jet printers use - piezoelectric crystals to prepare ink.

Bubble jet printer Ink bubble forms inside the nozzle and a tiny drop of ink is expelled at high speed. When the drop hits a paper surface, it forms a round dot of even density and color. The heating element is switched on and off in response to data from a computer, which processes the information from an image file.

Bubble jet printer To speed things up, use multiple nozzles for each color of ink and combines all the nozzles into a single print head. High quality, Speed and Low cost.

Thermal printer A thermal print head melts waxbased ink from the transfer ribbon onto the paper, when cool it’s permanent. These printers print images as dots, which means that images must be dithered first. As a result, images are not quite photo-realistic, although they are very good.

Thermal printer Don't require special paper (e. g. in dye transfer printers) and they are faster, quit and economical etc. Commercial applications – filling stations pumps, point of sales systems and voucher printers etc.

Laser printer Operate by shining a laser beam to produce an image on a drum. Then the drum is rolled through a pool, or reservoir, or toner, and the electrically charged portions of the drum pick up ink. Finally, using a combination of heat and pressure, the ink on the drum is transferred onto the page.

Laser printer Laser printers print very fast, and the supply cartridges work a long time. Color laser printers use the same toner-based printing process as black and white (B/W) laser printers, except that they combine four different toner colors.

Special types of printers Plotters 3 D Printers Label Printers Versa-laser Printer CD/DVD Printers Multifunctional Printers

Plotters Large-scale printers those are very accurate at reproducing line drawings. Commonly used for technical drawings such as engineering drawings or architectural blueprints etc. The two basic types of plotters flatbed plotters drum plotters.

Label Printer The smartest way to print labels one at a time. The printers allow easy installation. Can get high-quality, professional results every time

CD/DVD Printer Provide a low cost way to create professional printed CD-R and DVD-R. Can print directly on the CD or DVD surface. With high speed and can print full color image.

Multifunctional Printers A machine combined top -quality color ink-jet or laser printing with PC faxing, color copying, color scanning and telephoning etc. All in one, convenient, space-saving machine.

Versa-Laser. TM Printer Peripheral tool that can transform images or drawings on your computer screen into real items made out of an amazing variety of materials. � Wood, Plastic, Fabric, Paper etc. Versa-Laser™ is a brand name. (Universal Laser Systems Inc. )

3 D Printers Creates physical models directly from computeraided design system (CAD) and other digital data. The printer is fast, versatile and simple. Allowing engineers to produce a range of concept models and functional test parts quickly and inexpensively.

Summary What is a printer ? Printer classification Printer I/O interface Printer languages Printer qualities commonly used printers and their technologies Special types of printers

Group members �Basura Ramanayake 2008082 �Isuru Samarasinghe 2008098 �Rishikeshan Parasuraman 2008086 �Udayashangari Sivaji 2008085 - IIT JANUARY INTAKE – 2009 -

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