Introduction Of Printer

All of us have used inkjet and laser printers to provide physical copies of our work. Few, however, realize the complex technology involved in the design and manufacturing of a computer printer. Before completing a lab exercise involving the analysis of a printer, it would be best to review the differing technologies involved in printers.

Most of us are primarily familiar with two categories of printers – inkjet and laser. Although most printers in use today fall in to one of these two categories, there are many other printer designs that have been used in the past 50 years, most of which are still in at least limited use today. These include printer designs specialized for particular applications such as the production of multipart forms or the reproduction of high quality artwork.

Some of the types of printers you encounter may include:

• Line

• Dot Matrix

• Bubble Jet

• Ink Jet

• Laser

• LED (LCD)

• Thermal

• Dye Sublimation

• Solid Ink

• Thermal Wax

• Daisy Wheel

• Plotter

• 3-D (Rapid Prototyping)

• MICR (Magnetic Ink Character Recognition)

• Braille

The following brief descriptions will give you a start at understanding these technologies. Links are provided to additional resources for more detailed explanations.
Dot Matrix Printing

In dot matrix printing small metal wires are forced out of a print head to force an inked ribbon against the paper, thus leaving a small dot of ink on the paper. Early dot matrix printers typically had a column of 9 wires in the print head. As the print head was moved across the paper the wires were activated to form the characters. To get higher quality, print heads were created with 24 pins in two columns. By offsetting the two columns of print heads, considerably higher quality text (and limited graphics) could be created. Some later dot matrix printers (quickly replaced when ink jet technology became available) had multicolor ribbons to allow color printing. These printers had to make multiple passes across the page to allow printing of each color by shifting the ribbon position. In addition to the limited quality available from dot matrix printers, their biggest problem was the noise generated by the rapid impact of the print wires. Printers were often enclosed in sound deadening boxes to reduce office noise.

These printers are still commonly used in applications where multiple copies of a form are required using carbon paper or carbonless forms. The impact of the pins may be adjusted to create an image to the depth required.

A very good description of the dot matrix printing process may be found at the Micromechanic website, mimech.com/printhead-technology.asp.
A peripheral device which produces text or graphics of documents is called printer. The printer produces print for the files or documents stored in electronic form in electronic media.

Usually the print comes on physical media such as paper or transparencies. The printers are generally used as local peripheral device and are attached by a simple printer cable. Now in new printers USB cable is used for making the use easier. Normally printers are designed for supporting both local user and network user at the same time but there are some printers which are specially designed for using on the network. These printers are typically designed in network interface.

The new generations of the printers are ready for using directly with the storage media or other electronic media. It means that it allows you to print direct from the camera to memory card of your device and it is not compulsory to connect with the computer.