What Is Printer And What Are The Types Of Printers?

           Most of the general purpose printers are impact printers. In such machines printing is achieved by pressing the solid characters against a ribbon, which in turn prints the impression on paper, almost like a type writer.  A line of print is achieved by moving a print head across the page. The print head may be a dot matrix or a daisy wheel. There are different types of printers.  

           First one is line printers. These printers print one line at a time.  The characters are embossed on the mental surface. This mental surface may be in the form of a scalloped steel band. One band consists of all print positions. Print hammers are located at each print position. The drum or hand rotates to bring the required characters on the line and the hammer strikes from across the paper and a carbon ribbon to print it at the right position.

           Using print drum approach, speed of over 2000 lines per minute has been achieved. While using scalloped steel print bands, speed of over 3000 lines per minute has been achieved. In all these impact printers letters are printed by forcing the paper and the print head or hammer together. Obviously they are noisy and also require inked ribbons.

There are two types of output devices. First Temporary output devices and second is Permanent output devices. Temporary output devices include monitor and projectors and Permanent output devices include printers, plotter and micro films.

Printer is an output device which is connected to computer to get permanent output. The output of printer is also called Hard Copy. There are two types of printers (a) Impact printers (b) non-impact printers.

Impact printers include Dot matrix and Line printer. These printers print output by stroking with pins of hammers. Normally page travels through the printer and pins or hammers storks against the paper with ribbon and the required output is printed on the paper.

Non-impact printers include ink-jet printer, thermal printer and laser jet printer. The output is printed on paper by using special ink. In ink-jet printers, the liquid ink is used. The paper is traveled in the paper and a head sprays the ink on it. In thermal printer no ink is used, instead of a special paper is used. A fax machine is the example of this. A laser jet printer used dry power ink placed in a cartridge. The cartridge also has a drum which is charged magnetically. A charged drum uses the in from cartridge and places it on the paper. Paper then goes through a heater which dries the ink.

An output device that produces a hard copy{ printed paper output) is called a printer. It is tangible and permanent. We can make black & white and colored copies with the help of computers. The size of columns or characters in one line is considered as the size of printing. Normally the printers can print 80 columns per line or 132 columns per line.

There are two types of printers
1) Impact printers.
2) Non-Impact printers.

In Impact Printers, the result is produced by a character shaped print hammer, striking a ribbon against the paper. Impact printers are of two kinds i.e Character printers and line printers. Character printers are just like typewriters. These print character by character across the page within the defined margin. Daisy Wheel printer is an example of character printers. Line printers assemble all characters on a line at one time and print them simultaneously. Chain printer is an example of line printers.

In Non-Impact printers, there is no physical contact with the paper while printing on it. These printers are faster and quieter. Non-impact printers are also of two kinds i.e Ink jet printers and Laser Printer. Ink jet printer sprays ink from jet nozzles and is ten times faster than impact printers. Laser printers use a light beam to transfer images to paper. Laser beam writes an image onto the surface of the rotating metal drum, then ink toner writes an image on the paper.

Ariz Mohammad Brohi
The printer is such type of device that enable us to get print desire result on paper which is called document. As soon as we have printed own desire data on paper then we can't able to modified it.

There are the two type of printer.
1. Impact
2. Non-impact

About three types of printers