Introduction to Printers

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Printers are used for producing hard copy i.e., to generate the output on paper. They provide information in a permanent, readable form. Printers are most commonly used output devices in computer systems. A wide variety of printing devices are available and they can be classified according to the print quality and the printing speeds.

1. Printing Technology - Impact printers and non impact printers.
• Impact printers use electro mechanical mechanism where a hammer strikes paper through inked ribbon. Non-impact printers do not hit a ribbon but uses chemical, thermal or electrical signals to print the information on a paper. 
2. Character Forms - dot matrix and fully formed characters
• Dot matrix character is made up of carefully arranged sequence of dots packed very close to each other. Fully formed character is made from solid lines and curves.
3. Printing Sequence - character, line and page
• Character printer (or serial printer) will print character by character. Line printer forms an entire line, prints a line at a time. Page printer forms an entire page, and prints a page at a time. 

Now a days people are using three types of printers. Those are Inkjet, Laser and All-in-one printers.

• Inkjet Printers : These are the normal printers. Ink cartridges will be there, you should fill them / replace them when every the ink levels are over. For personal and office uses, people are using these type of printers.
• Laser Printers : These are little expensive when compared to Inkjet printers but they can print of huge reams of text documents in record time while having a lower cost per page than most inkjet printers. So people who need to print more use laser printers.
• All in one printers : These printers accomplish all the requirements of a normal user. These are simply a printer combined with a scanner and photocopier, sometimes with a fax machine too. Both inkjet and laser printers come in this form. There are for office purposes and little expensive. 

That's all for now friends. From our next post we shall discuss about various types of printers in detail. Happy Reading :)

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