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Printers: Price, Compatibility, Color, Speed, Resolution, Paper Size, Envelopes

Learn about printers - Dot Matrix, Ink Jets, Laser - their prices, speeds, resolutions, paper handling, compatibility, and more. Discover types of printers, their pros, and cons along with fonts and print buffers.

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Printers: Price, Compatibility, Color, Speed, Resolution, Paper Size, Envelopes

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  1. Printers: Basic Questions • price - and running costs? • compatible with your computer? • colour or black and white? • speed of printing? • what resolution? • amount of paper the tray can handle? • will it take the paper sizes you want to use? • do you need to print envelopes?

  2. Dot Matrix Printer • price: the least expensive printers. • basic idea: a print head with small blunt pins hits an inked ribbon: like a typewriter except that the same pins produce all char-acters. The precise configuration of pins changes - to allow different characters to be represented - according to the instructions sent by the computer. • speed: in the range 1 to 18 pages a minute

  3. Dot Matrix Printer - 2 • resolution: poorfor 9 pin; fair for 24 pin. • noise level: high • ink: on the ribbon - replace it when dry • paper: single sheet or continuous fanfold • SUMMARY - old, but worth considering if price is more important than output quality or quietness. Ideal for multicopy forms - the impact is needed to print through carbons.

  4. Ink Jets • price: cheap to middle range • basic idea: a print head sprays ink through small holes onto the page • speed: in the range of half to four pages per minute • resolution: 180 to 720 dots per inch • noise level: low

  5. More on Ink Jets • ink: in cartridges - replace when empty • paper: single sheet. Most ink jets will take envelopes, labels and transparencies. • SUMMARY: widely used, offering high quality output relatively cheaply. Colour ink jets are especially popular, being much less expensive than laser printers but still giving good results.

  6. Laser Printers • price: middle to top of the range • basic idea: in essence a copier. Instead of dealing with characters it simply produces a high quality photocopy. • speed: between 4 and 30 pages per minute • resolution: 300 to 1200 dots per inch • noise level: low

  7. More on Laser Printers • ink: a fine powdered ink, toner, is stored in a cartridge. Replace when empty. • paper: single sheets up to A4 and higher, envelopes, labels and transparencies (the last must be for laser or photocopier use) • colour: output from colour laser is dearer than that from colour inkjet, but better.

  8. Still More on Laser Printers • multifunction: some laser printers do other jobs - faxing, scanning and photocopying • memory: because of the way they work - storing pages before printing - lasers have at least 1 MB of memory, often a lot more. For high resolution (600 + dpi) and/or complex graphics and/or A3 output, a lot of memory is needed.

  9. Finally on Laser Printers Laser output requires a printer language, software to tell the printer how to print. There are two types of printer language: • PCL: Printer Control Language. PCL lasers are fine for routine office work: cheaper but with less graphic capability than ... • Postscript lasers, able to print complex graphics, fonts and colours. Very popular in graphic design environments.

  10. For a readable account of laser printers, try this web page:http://www.dungeon.com/~poota/lpbook/01-chp1.html

  11. Other Types of Printer • Solid Ink: high quality but relatively cheap colour images on paper or transparency • Thermal-Wax: sharp, rich images that don’t smear • Dye Sublimation: also known as thermal dye transfer printers; very expensive but producing images that look like colour photographs.

  12. Fonts • Character sets of a given design and size. The font used here is Times New Roman .. • .. this is Arial • Most printers come with built in, resident, fonts (you can add to them). Resident fonts print faster than those on your computer. • There are two basic kinds of font: TrueType and Bitmapped

  13. Buffers and Spoolers Computers send data much faster than print-ers print it. To avoid the computer waiting, data is dumped into an intermediate store for release to the printer at a manageable speed. This frees up the processor for other tasks. These intermediate stores take two forms: buffers and spoolers

  14. Buffers & Spoolers - 2 • A buffer is asection of printer memory that receives the computer’s output. When the buffer is full, the computer must wait before sending any more.. • A spooler is a program that stores informat-ion ready for printing on the computer. Far bigger documents can be stored on spoolers than on printer buffers. Windows comes with a built-in print spooler.

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